The poetical works of William H. C. Hosmer :: :: University of Virginia Library

THE PROSPECTS OF THE AGE.

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READ BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT, AUGUST 3, 1841.

While lettered idlers turn the mouldy page
For dreamy records of a Golden Age,
Ere the dark seed of mortal ill was sown,
And crime and want and misery were known—
When ancient Pan attuned his classic reeds,
And faun and dryad danced on flowery meads;
Regret the fate, with aspect cold and sour,
That makes them insects of the present hour,
Born like the leaf or herb to pass away,
Heirs of disease and premature decay,
Ours be the nobler task to scan aright
The prospects opening in this AGE OF LIGHT.

Now is the hallowed time!—from Heaven a voice
Calls on the race of Adam to rejoice;—
Roused by the glad, regenerating sound,
The startled bondsman wakes, and looks around;
While, one by one, the clouds begin to roll
From the long veiled horizon of his soul,
He asks his Lord, with stern, undaunted eye:
“Why chained these limbs, and thine unshackled—why?
Alike the dusty atoms are that form
Our grosser parts, my haughty brother worm!
Alike the laws that govern our career
From the low cradle to the darkened bier:
Great, equal Nature, liberal to all,
Pours the same radiance on the hut and hall,

Decks in the same impartial green the mould
Above the bones of king or beggar old,
Sends the same airs of breathing balm to kiss
The homeless outcast and the child of bliss,
Nor glads the couch of down with dream more bright
Than the coarse straw where poor men rest by night.
Though storm and hardship have imbrowned my skin,
Immortal longings multiply within,
And the bright land that lies beyond the grave,
Distinction knows not between prince and slave.
Whence then thy right to rack my limbs with toil,
And bear away the produce of the soil;
Leave my poor babes in rags the blast to feel,
Wet with hot tears their scant, unwholesome meal,
And earthward, like the beasts that perish, gaze
From springtime to the winter of their days?
Whence, in assuming and insulting tones,
Thy right to ask what God himself disowns?
Lift while you may the scourge of high command,
The fall of Guilt Anointed is at hand—
Robbed millions on thy palace will have traced
Their vow that man no more will be abased!”

Thus mighty thought begins at last to shed
Reviving beams upon the humblest head;
Gives poor abused humanity a tongue,
An eye to pierce the gloom around it flung,
A breast of steel the conflict to abide—
Firm as the granite that beats back the tide.

Though blind oppression marvels at the change
Wrought in the mass, and deems it passing strange—
Friends of the wronged and stricken wonder more
That the good work did not progress before.
What hear we but an outcry for redress
Wrung from the broken heart of wretchedness;
The loud demand of labor why it pines,
And licensed fraud in glittering raiment shines;

Of o'er-tasked sorrow why so dark its lot,
And drunken sloth live on, and suffer not?

Gray Error trembles in his cloudy hold
To mark the banner of reform unrolled,
Dreads, like some hermit-owl, one ray of light
That glimmers through the pall of ancient night,
Retaining still the mummery of sway
While melts the substance of his power away.
Vain his endeavor, in resentment blind,
To crush the growing energies of mind;
As well the reed might try to check the force
Of the loud whirlwind in its rushing course,
Or pattering rain essay to drown the roar
Of ocean breaking on a rocky shore.
Come will a day of jubilee ere long,
When power will cease to legalize a wrong,
When tottering kingcraft, to prolong its reign,
Will point to ancient precedent in vain
And laws enacted in a barbarous time
Will cease to give authority to crime.

Far back in years philosophy may date,
While viewing man improved in his estate,
The fair beginning of this war sublime
Against corrupting usages of time.
Thick clouds and darkness gloomed around our race,
And peace, the dove, could find no resting place;
Uncurbed Ambition gave his life to guilt—
Red Murder boasted of the blood he spilt—
By day fierce Rapine for his booty prowled,
And Hell a note of exultation howled—
Nations and tribes, imbruted and despoiled,
Like driven cattle for their tyrants toiled,
When, lo! a Star of clear, benignant ray
Rolled from the source of everlasting day,
While brighter far than flash of jewel'd crown,
Its full-orbed blaze on Galilee poured down.

Before its golden pathway, like a dream,
Fled the foul mist that rose to quench its beam.
Oh, THEN commenced the long, unended fight
Between the powers of darkness and of light—
Then learned the pauper that his frame of earth
Enshrined a living pearl of priceless worth,
Formed to shine on, when dimmed the ruby red
Worn by the great who gave him stone for bread!
Oh, then more potent than the battle-storm,
The gospel proved an agent of reform:
Refreshed by draughts from its immortal fount
Upward the human soul began to mount,
And shook the dust from its immortal plume.
Emerging from an atmosphere of gloom.
Heaved, like the sea, the bosom of the mass—
Bands from the spirit fell like shivered glass;
Hope, from the house of mourning doomed to roam,
Found in the broken heart once more a home;
Balm in the wound of misery was poured,
Cleansed was the leper, and the lost restored;
Strong grew the weak—the lame arose and walked,
Their sight the blind received, the voiceless talked.

Christ sought nor tower, nor palace-hall, nor throne
To make his high, divine commission known;
An honored vessel, in his cause to aid,
Of meek, neglected lowliness he made,
And chose unlettered champions to confound
Dissembling sophist, and the sage renowned.
While spake his clear, melodious voice THE WORD,
The poor, in deep, respectful silence heard,
Though haughty ruler, pharisee and scribe
Their scorn evinced by taunt and heartless jibe.

Plumed Pomp contemned a teacher and a guide
Who taught our world the nothingness of pride,
Divested him, though magnet of all eyes,
Of florid mask and fanciful disguise,

Then oped the portals of his heart of sin,
And proved though fair without, how foul within!
Rapacious Power could ill a teacher brook
Who heeded not the terror of his look,
Nor prized his rod of regal office more
Than crutch of crippled vagrant at his door;
Whose wondrous love, within no bound confined,
Embraced the high and low of human kind—
Whose doctrines tended to redeem the slave
Lost in the midnight of a moral grave,
And clear his clouded vision to behold
How vile the wretch to whom his flesh was sold!

Though oft in huts where penury abides,
A famished wretch the hunted felon hides,
And fallen manhood, charged with liquid fire,
On injured woman vents his brutal ire,
Or tattered frenzy stalks, of wasted form,
Beneath a roof that ill keeps out the storm;
Oh, seldom there, with dark, despairing eye,
Is found the fiend of infidelity.
Among the poor, degraded, and untaught
Our Savior's grandest miracles were wrought;
Called by his voice, the widowed one of Nain
Beheld her tomb-robed child arise again.
He came in light to cheer the saddest hearth,
And banish inequalities from earth;
No right of primogeniture he knew
Nor wall that hedged the many from the few;
All with their Maker's breathing image stamped,
Upon earth's common battle-ground encamped,
From kingly Saul to Lazarus despised,
Alike by his impartial heart were prized.

Those born beneath a more auspicious star,
Who journey on in fortune's dazzling car,
Too oft by pleasures of the world enslaved,
Frame creeds to suit an appetite depraved.

Awhile their frail mortality forget,
And deem no limit to their glory set.
Another class, with pride of knowledge filled,
On crumbling sand their airy systems build,
And oft, with foolish and derisive smile,
A fiction old, that sacred volume style.

Ye learned in vain! Your eyes on nature turn,
And from her page one truthful lesson learn!
Look on that field of ripe and waving corn,
Swept by the breeze, and colored like the morn—
Behold ye not how proudly from the mould,
Rise the light stalks that bear no ears of gold,
While others, burthened with the precious grain,
Kiss with their tasselled garniture the plain!
Though high your heads in arrogance are raised,
False, fleeting lights, to lure ye on, have blazed—
For ye in vain hath burned the midnight oil,
Chaff is the product of your lettered toil;
With the meek temper of a sinless child,
Again peruse the book ye have reviled,
And see through clouds a SUN that never sets,
While wisdom deep humility begets.

The common people of our world have caught
From HOLY WRIT the quenchless fires of thought:
Learned that terrestrial grandeur is a shade,
And that all things for Cæsar were not made.
Gone are those evil days when tyrants sealed
The lip of woe, and wrong went unrevealed;
When the spurned vassal, cursing in despair
A yoke that nature could no longer bear,
Was gravely charged with treason, foul and black,
And mangled by the headsman or the rack.
The plundered thunder execration now
When robbers gather where they do not plough,
Nor stand in fear of torture or the block
Though rotten thrones to their foundations rock.

“Our bread is taxed”—says one—“by drones we feed!
In war our veins, to pamper villains, bleed!”
Exclaims another—“Up, ye sons of toil,
And sweep the greedy locusts from the soil!
Why looks yon titled fopling down in scorn
On the brown yeoman who is cottage-born,
And envies him his share of sunshine mild—
Was not the Bard of Ayr a peasant's child,
And poor the mother who, delighted, heard
Her infant Shakespeare breathe his earliest word?
While rolls the sluggard in his coach and four,
Shall famine enter honest labor's door?
No! on the wings of mighty winds send forth
The seed of freedom, and enfranchise earth!”

In frozen climes, and under tropic skies,
Up the bruised victims of injustice rise,
To rend the shackles that their fathers wore,
Roused by a voice that thunders—“Sleep no more!”
In lone and far-off islands of the brine
Dull night beholds her ancient sway decline,
Alarmed, forsakes her couch of hoary moss
While christians plant the banner of the Cross.
The fires of human sacrifice are quenched,
Purged are the tribes in carnage lately drenched;
Foul shrines and broken images of stone
Fall while the trump of Calvary is blown;
No more the war-note of the conch is heard
While savage forms for murderous conflict gird;
His dread repast the cannibal abjures
To bathe in bright, atoning blood that cures—
Looks on the star that to a Savior leads,
And with the bread of life his spirit feeds.

Be hushed, ye pale alarmists of the day,
Who look on man, awaking, with dismay,
Then lift your croaking voices, and oppose
Bold hearts who dare to tyranny be foes!

In vain ye toil to fetter pen and speech—
Long since exploded was the creed ye teach,
That human nature is in essence, vile—
Lawless, when free—when trusted, full of guile;
When honored, vicious, and no worse, enslaved—
False when refined; intelligent, depraved,
And only harmless when by fear restrained,
From youth to age in base submission trained.
While ye are struggling with innoxious rage,
To fetter down the spirit of the age,
Think of the lesson taught us by the Dane,
Who breathed his mandate to the bellowing main;
On swept the waters in their sandy track,
Though waved his puny wand to roll them back!

Look on our fair Republic of the West,
And know the question settled, and at rest,
Regarding man's capacity on earth
To rise progressive in the scale of worth!
Who were the fathers of our country?—men
Who bearded the grim Lion in his den,
Nor feared his fang, nor trembled at his roar,
Although his bristling main was steeped in gore.
Corruption in high places they assailed,
And the vile tricks of hollow courts unveiled:—
High Priests of independence, here they found
Hesperian groves where man might walk unbound!
Green Mountain Boys! I know that ye are proud
Of these rude peaks that rise to kiss the cloud,
For on New-England's rocky shrine first blazed
The fiery column by the Pilgrim raised:
With Allen's rifle and the shaft of Tell
Guard through the coming years that beacon well!
Here sons of genius, though in hovels bred,
Bright paths that lead to posts of honor tread:
Fame open flings his temple-gate full wide,
And merit enters unappalled by pride,

Albeit he frowns and turns a “shoulder cold,”
As if his flesh was formed of rarer mould.
Not on light sand-hills of the desert waste
Our fabric of Free Government is based,
But on the rock of public virtue rests,
Its shield a breathing wall of free-born breasts.
Our future, pregnant with sublime events,
Will gladden seas, and isles, and continents,
And realms, at last, will flourish uncontroll'd
By sceptered things whose “gods are blood and gold.”

Unbar the gloomy portals of the past—
How red the shroud round perished Empire cast!
Thick as the bearded grain by Labor mown,
Lie bannered hosts in battle overthrown.
From cottage homes and thronging cities rise
Yells of expiring millions to the skies.
Ambition, pleased, bemocks their horrid groans,
And, shod with iron, treads on crumbling bones.
Tasked is the strength of thousands to upbuild
Colossal tombs with coffined grandeur filled.
The place of beast by manhood is supplied,
Whipped onward, harnessed to the car of Pride—
Foul Priestcraft, mantled in an ebon stole,
Abroad walks forth with blood upon his soul;
Clasps his polluted hands in Godless prayer
While tortures rend the sinews of despair,
Or, with disdain in his relentless eye,
Exacts the little all of misery.
Anointed Folly from his regal seat
Points to proud arch, or labyrinth of Crete,
As monuments to memorize his sway
When kingdom, crown, and court have passed away.
Renowned Apelles prostitutes his art
Esteem to wake within a tyrant's heart—
Wit wildly revels in the joys of sense,
And terror chains the tongue of eloquence.

No voice, inspired, the cause of justice pleads,
Or God invokes to punish evil deeds:
A venal harp the laurelled minstrel strings
To flatter pomp and win applause from kings,
And pensioned learning false deduction draws,
To prove that Nero sanctions wholesome laws.
Here prowls unsparing bigotry at work,
In her ensanguined hand a sheathless dirk.
Her deeds—too dreadful for the lyre to tell—
Her dooming eye—“a glimmering type of Hell.”
There laughs the lord who governs half the globe,
Wrapped in the foldings of his purple robe,
While bounds the famished lion from his den
Matched in unequal strife with naked men,
And corpses cumber, half afloat in gore,
The broad arena's thickly sanded floor.

Another leaf in history is turned—
Another lesson have the nations learned;
Clouds, charged with moral lightning, sternly lower
Above the heartless satellites of Power—
The Mother-land by crime too long defiled,
Is taking healthful counsel from her Child,
And, one by one, from her old bleeding heart
The greedy vultures of misrule depart.
One wild misnomer of the mournful past,
That led our sires astray, is changed at last;
Conquest, enthroned on heaps of slain up piled,
Is rebaptized, and wholesale murder styled.
No common cause now hurries to the field
A Christian soldier, armed with spear and shield
And empires ponder patiently and long,
Before they war for some imagined wrong.
With grave rebuke Philosophy looks down
On that dread phantom, National Renown,
Whose star hath lighted nations to their graves,
And flooded groaning Earth with crimson waves.

Green Erin lifts her head above the deep,
Roused from the torpor of her drunken sleep,
And tunes the harp of Tara to a lay
That breathes of joy, and darkness chased away.
Late through her isle a demon strode unchecked
Who laughed while round him were her children wrecked;
Of human skulls a hideous throne he made,
And woe, disease, and death his call obeyed—
In dungeon, churchyard, and on scaffold grim
Courts, that make manhood blush, were held by him,
And Mars, astonished, flung away his lance,
Eclipsed in horror by Intemperance.
Now, from her fields a triumph cry goes up,
Indignant hands dash down the poisoned cup;
Away dark weed from Emmett's grave she clears,
A radiant smile is beaming through her tears,
And, while the brand of Cain her brow forsakes,
The withe that bound her limb, like Samson, breaks.

Right, reason, and religion have combined
Vice to denounce, and purify mankind.
Not the blind impulse of a mob impels
The public heart that glows, and heaves, and swells,
Engendering acts of outrage and of shame,
With ruin fraught, and terrible to name.
A spirit, by philanthropy approved,
Glides calmly on and multitudes are moved:
It makes no mad appeal to carnal force,
Nor speeds by war companioned in its course,
While follow wolves and ravens to devour
Dismembered fragments of the battle hour;
Plays not the Teian with existence brief,
Pleased with an odorous rose, or myrtle leaf,
While locust-swarms, that sky and air imbrown,
On the green fields of bliss are settling down.

It asks not for political success
That props the strong—gives wealth a gayer dress;

On outward, cold magnificence depends,
And only comfort to the happy sends;
That boasts of steeds, caparisoned and fleet,
Whirling the car of triumph through the street,
Of temple, column, pile, and massive dome,
Though Peace, like Judah, roves without a home;
But that perfection in the social plan
Which throws an ægis o'er degraded man,
Diffusing light throughout the common herd,
While grief's black depths are to the bottom stirred

Love for our dying brotherhood it feels,
To common sense and equity appeals;
Explores each haunt where lust the wine-cup quaffs,
And o'er the corse of ruined beauty laughs;
Tracks human sorrow to its fountain springs—
Ill-gotten gold from hard extortion wrings;
Locks with a touch dark slander's perjured lips,
And thin disguise from base pretension strips;
A lamp of safety fashions for the mine,
And airs the work-shop where Earth's orphans pine
Gives fiery pinions to an iron steed,
A rival of the thunderbolt in speed;
Charters the sun-beam faithfully to trace
A breathing outline of the human face;
Launches strange barks, defying wind and flood,
To make of earthly realms, one neighborhood;
Goes on a quest of mercy to the cell
Where pale remorse anticipates his knell;
Denies the right of ermined law to doom
A felon, even, to an early tomb,
Tall gibbet rear, or scaffold redly drench,
And fires, that God can only kindle, quench.
It scans the future with prophetic gaze,
And whispers promise of millennial days,
When man will tread on flowers, that know not frost,
Perfumed like those that graced his Eden lost;

And wear, unsullied by one leprous stain,
His crown of primal innocence again,
Dashed from his lustrous and majestic brows,
While yet his lip was warm with broken vows.

Truth, beaten down on many a luckless field,
Bears now this stern device upon her shield—
“Away with sleep, while bigot, knave, and fool
Sit throned with high, exclusive right to rule!”
Though black and adverse flags are on the blast,
How can she fail of victory at last!
Cased is her towering form in burnished mail,
Proof against rust, barbed lance, and iron hail—
Timed is her march to battle by the sound
Of golden harps, the throne of God around,
And, tempered with pure lightning from the sky,
Flames the charmed weapon that she lifts on high.

Brothers, a word!—From quiet, classic bowers,
Where long our hands have cropped immortal flowers,
With ears accustomed only to the flow
Of silver, welling waters, forth we go!
Soon will the rushing surge of active life
Greet our approach with roar that tells of strife—
Envenomed monsters, hungering for their prey,
Paths that our feet must follow now, waylay;
Our moral armor we must well inspect,
Nor antedate our ruin by neglect:
Oh! cease we never to guard well the fires
Thas lit the bosoms of our Saxon sires,
And while we rove, by gales of fortune blown,
From the parched tropic to the frozen zone,
Glassed in the wave of memory, clear and deep,
Bright let each heart New-England's image keep!
Her vales forget not, and her mountain peaks
Round which the cloud revolves, the eagle shrieks—
Where Beauty dwells, and intellect conforms,
In strength and grandeur, to her rocks and storms,

And reigns Religion, 'mid a world of woes,
Pure as her streams and spotless as her snows.
On us, in pleading tone, our Alma calls
Never to shame her consecrated halls—
To banish serpent-passion from our hearts,
And, in the cause of right, play noble parts,
While round our steps celestial light is shed,
And sleep in honored sepulchres when dead.