In vain against the clang of swords
The wailing pipe is blown!
Act, act in God’s name, while ye may!
Smite from the church her leprous limb!
Throw open to the light of day
The bondman’s cell, and break away
The chains the state has bound on him!
Ho! every true and living soul,
To Freedom’s perilled altar bear
The Freeman’s and the Christian’s whole
Tongue, pen, and vote, and prayer!
One last, great battle for the right—
One short, sharp struggle to be free!
To do is to succeed—our fight
Is waged in Heaven’s approving sight;
The smile of God is Victory.
TEXAS
VOICE OF NEW ENGLAND
The five poems immediately following indicate the intense feeling of the friends of freedom in view of the annexation of Texas, with its vast territory sufficient, as was boasted, for six new slave States. [The first poem seems to have been written at the earnest entreaty of Lowell, who called on Whittier “to cry aloud and spare not against the accursed Texas plot.”]
Up the hillside, down the glen,
Rouse the sleeping citizen;
Summon out the might of men!
Like a lion growling low,
Like a night-storm rising slow,
Like the tread of unseen foe;
It is coming, it is nigh!
Stand your homes and altars by;
On your own free thresholds die.
Clang the bells in all your spires;
On the gray hills of your sires
Fling to heaven your signal-fires.
From Wachuset, lone and bleak,
Unto Berkshire’s tallest peak,
Let the flame-tongued heralds speak.
Oh, for God and duty stand,
Heart to heart and hand to hand,
Round the old graves of the land.
Whoso shrinks or falters now,
Whoso to the yoke would bow,
Brand the craven on his brow!
Freedom’s soil hath only place
For a free and fearless race,
None for traitors false and base.
Perish party, perish clan;
Strike together while ye can,
Like the arm of one strong man.
Like that angel’s voice sublime,
Heard above a world of crime,
Crying of the end of time;
With one heart and with one mouth,
Let the North unto the South
Speak the word befitting both:
“What though Issachar be strong!
Ye may load his back with wrong
Overmuch and over long:
“Patience with her cup o’errun,
With her weary thread outspun,
Murmurs that her work is done.
“Make our Union-bond a chain,
Weak as tow in Freedom’s strain
Link by link shall snap in twain.
“Vainly shall your sand-wrought rope
Bind the starry cluster up,
Shattered over heaven’s blue cope!
“Give us bright though broken rays,
Rather than eternal haze,
Clouding o’er the full-orbed blaze.
“Take your land of sun and bloom;
Only leave to Freedom room
For her plough, and forge, and loom;
“Take your slavery-blackened vales;
Leave us but our own free gales,
Blowing on our thousand sails.
“Boldly, or with treacherous art,
Strike the blood-wrought chain apart;
Break the Union’s mighty heart;
“Work the ruin, if ye will;
Pluck upon your heads an ill
Which shall grow and deepen still.
