Chapter III

Oh, what if lone and long thy lofty flight,
My country? Is thy vision not as clear
As that of Vesper, dauntless pioneer
On Twilight's altitude? As from that height,
He sees plain through the thick black walls of night,
The stars all massing; so dost thou, his peer,
Behold all peoples gathering, year by year,
To scale the clouds to thy White Range of Right.

How thy lone loftness, aloof from wrong,
Refracting man-ward, God's enrapturing smile
Of fruitful fields, leads legions! On they file
And phalanx, and the vision makes thee strong:
What, though God's searchlight flares the sky the while?
It nears not thee, ear-close to heaven's high song.

JUDAH AND ERIN

From out a desert where the trails run red,
Judah and Erin speed their camel pace,
Sighting green palms. The flush on either face
Is from the fissure where each wedged her head
From sandstorms, that hurled heavens down, as they sped;
It is no blush for thought, or conduct, base
To the high trust to bring the Human Race,
Truths, without which Time's offspring are born dead.

In spirit, they are sisters; for, beyond
The desert, where the vision, like a dove,
Soars round the palace of Almighty Love,
God hails them as "My Daughters, true and fond,
Who show man, through Noon blaze, my star above,
And to my will, fail never to respond."

THE EASTER RISING IN IRELAND

Who, in descent from Heaven's ecstatic throng,
Was twin to light, and ranged from source to sea,
And shore to peak, and God, drew up to thee
The generations happy, pure and strong?
Freedom, as Erin's was, ere ruthless wrong
Caught, scourged and hanged it on the out-law's tree;
And is; for lo! it proves Divinity,
Transfiguring from anguish, ages long.

True, they have strangled Freedom on the cross
Of every Right's suppression--nay, have barred
His body's tomb, and placed a host on guard!
Still, He is risen; His faithful mourn no loss.
He shines forth in their midst. No bolts retard
His entrance, where grand aims for life engross.

THE FIGHT IN IRELAND

The fight in Ireland is 'twixt Man and Brute.
A lion with the sea-surge for his mane,
Is there hurled back by Man with proud disdain,
Although heart-drained with gash from head to foot.
Oh, in that Eden of Forbidden Fruit,
How Satan, searching for a snake in vain,
Fumed forth a monster from his heart and brain--
The Lion--as the serpent's substitute!

Oh, all ye peoples of the World draw nigh!
Stand on the bodies of eight centuries,
Struck dead with horror; for, raised thus, one sees
In Erin, torn, a soul that cannot die,
And that its struggle is Humanity's
Against the fiend, who would give God the lie.

TO ERIN

How help take pride in thee, whose golden hair
Of culture trailed the earth for centuries;
Whose throne was freedom and whose realm was peace;
And, in strange lands, whose joy and only care
Were to spread light, and who, not anywhere
Thy charm made headway, planting liberties,
Didst, then, by stealthy step, or creep on knees,
Sow with the lilies, faster-growing tare!

How help love thee, whose hand, raised to the sun,
Glows rosy, and not red with murder's stain?
The angels kiss it. Force can forge no chain
To drag thee false-ward. Like a holy Nun,
Stigmated, how thy faith grows with thy pain--
Aye, till thy Cross, like Constantine's has won.

THE QUEEN OF BEAUTY

In rapt, roused Erin, who does not behold
A Venus, rising from the sea of tears,
Up to her native, Earth-illuming spheres?
Her hair, long matted, is a flow of gold
Which even the Sun might wear and feel not cold;
And, oh, her heavenly smile at doubts and fears,
As when she, at all depths, raised to her ears,
Shells of her Glory, murmuring, "Be bold!"

Lo! where the green and orange morn unfurls,
See Erin rise. How shine her golden tresses!
They form her crown, for trailing rocks down whirls,
And reaching all the under-sea recesses,
They draw about her brow, the rarest pearls--
Love for what frees and hate for what oppresses!

LIBERTY, THE LIGHT TO PEACE

All hail to those who, through the stormy night,
Make Liberty the light on Erin's coast;
Who, ceaseless, send up sparks; who hold their post
On each and every ledge of Human Right,
Forming a beacon blaze from base to height
Where Erin's hope may steer and land its host.
Look, Human Nature! Where else canst thou boast
To the eternal stars, so grand a sight?

Look! How men there ennoble human kind
By making Liberty the light to Peace!
All other lights are false. Oh! who but sees
In the unconquerable Celtic mind
That, even in Time, there are Eternities--
Love, true to Right, and Will no wrong can bind!

WHY PLAY WITH WORDS, ENGLAND?

Why play with words? There never can be peace
Till Ireland is set free. One might as well
Expect the great Arch-angel rest in Hell
And genuflect to Satan's blasphemies,
As Erin's spirit that, for centuries,
Has been aloft with God in virtue, sell,
Like Esaw, her birthright, and not rebel,
But to her home's invaders, bend her knees.

Her spirit is no norbury Banshee--
To wail and, then, to vanish. She will stand
With lifted flambeau, lighted by the hand
That lights the stars, till she again is free,
Inspiring normal man in every land
With love of Freedom, by her scorn of thee.

FREEDOM'S WARDENS

Look! British fury that, barraging, lights
Up Irish skies, like pathways down to hell,
Doubles its fire to reach our land as well,
Where Freedom's Wardens cry from justice' heights:
"'Tis Deicide to murder Human Rights.
Stop foul God-slaughter where to not rebel,
In order to develop and excel,
Were God in man, succumbed to age-longed blights."

Where Heavenward rose the God in man of old,
Staunch stand these Wardens. Sleepless, they behold
Each turn of England's Evil Eye. They call,
When she would form the fulminate of gold,
A thumb and finger-pinch of which, let fall,
Might blast Columbia's peaks to slit of thrall.

LIST TO DEMOSTHENES, IF NOT TO HEARST

Of all the fulminates, gold is the worst,
Which England, aeroplaning, now, lets drop
By day and night, in bank, press, church and shop,
Timed to the minute that it is to burst.
List to Demosthenes, if not to Hearst,
Sublime Republic! Lest thy great heart stop,
Shocked by the blast of Freedom's every prop,
And bats and owls in dwellings, Human's erst.

"Watch Macedon. She drops her gold, in creeping
Beneath free Athens' sky-ascending stair.
Watch her with glance of sword. Oh, watch, for where
She sows her gold, she comes with scythes for reaping!
Is Athens in ascent with sun-light flare,
To come down ashes, not worth history's keeping?"

CALEDONIA

I

In only Wallace and Paul Jones and Burns,
Does Caledonia, child of Erin, show
His mother's features, lit by soul to know
The Right Divine of freedom, when it yearns
For what exalts the human, or, it spurns
What bars its flight to truth--all stars aglow,
That form God's trail to joy for man below?--
Sole trail, as time, who peers through grief, discerns.

O Caledonia, by thy Burn's brave song,
And deeds of Wallace and Paul Jones for Right,
Thy mother knows thee in the dark of night,
And claps thee heart-close. She cries out: "Be strong,
Soul of my soul! though not a Boswell quite,
Still, be whole man! remember Glencoe's wrong."

II

Wake, Caledonia! though Macauley, Whigging,
Would ward the flames from scarring William's face,
So that, then, Cain might shriek,--here, take my place,
A fugitive and outcast, with no digging
To hide in, nor a rest for my fatiguing;
The mark on me, is but God's finger trace;
On you, 'tis God's whole hand!--Still, there's the blaze!
There's England's soul of merciless intriguing!

List! 'tis the bagpipes welcoming the guest.
See the assembly, dance and feast. Oh, watch
The open heart and flow of good old Scotch;
The English come, as friends, must have the best.
There, hospitality is at top notch,--
And so is treachery in Britain's breast.

III

The cock crows.--Is he dreaming? 'Tis dark still.
He crows again and now, from farm to farm,
His fellows echo far his dazed alarm
And flap of wings on fences. He is shrill
Because it is not dawn above the hill,
That wakes him, but the English, as they arm,
And murder sleep, that has no dream of harm,
In couch and crib,--to further England's will.

O Caledonia! with such lamp in hand
As Glencoe's horror, thou hast England true.
Why let Froude fiction haze thy vivid view?
Put not thy light out for sound sleep, but stand
And answer, when the mother, whom thou drew
Thy soul from, cries "Glencoe"! when Black and Taned.

CANADA

I

O Canada, Long red with cottage flame
From Britain's torch! thy blasts milk not the cloud
To nourish hope; instead, they spread the shroud
On Human Spirit answering Freedom's claim.
Whence comes the cold which icicles with shame,
Thy heart's Niagara, that should thunder loud
Unto thy far off soul in sorrow, bowed
O'er Papineau, whom Thraldom could not tame?

Now following the Friends, who grandly led
The slave through tunnels to the Northern Star,
To find, in freedom, richer bloomage far,
Than the Magnolia o'er the cattle shed,--
I reach thy soul,--where now the Crawfords are,
And learn the cold is not from manhood dead.

II

Whence comes this cold to Freedom's claim? we know
Only too well,--from creatures of the King,
Who had dragged Hell of every poisonous thing
And, through our country, had spread waste and woe.
Beaten at last, they flocked like carion crow,
On the dead body of their will to sting,
Which drifting Northward, and enlargening,
Loomed Dante's Nimrod, 'mid the Arctic snow.

There, with the reptile's hate of Man Upright,
As God created him, and reptiles veins,
Aflow with deaths cold blood--for that sustains
The life of tyrant and of parasite--
This monster, though half sunk in Hell, remains
High, still, above the Arctic's shuddering night.

III

The monster's inhalations empty Hell
Of all deterents to Life's flow and flower;
Then, its outbreathings icily devour
The cataract in flight and, down the dell,
The streamlets to delight, and buds, as well,
Of virtue, forming bloom for Freedom's bower;--
Nay, its out breathings,--through Creed hatred's power--
Grow Boreus and face where freeman dwell.

Lo! with Sun-warmth for Truth and Human Right,
Is Boreus met. Who hurles him down the deep?
Look close;--'tis Gladden who, on Freedom's steep,
Is as inspiring, as, on Andes' height,
The great Christ Statue, bidding Rancor sleep
And Life's diverging rays in love, beam Light.

IV

The cataracts wild leap, turned glittering ice
In shame's suspension, and crow souls afeeding
Upon a huge dead body and fast breeding,--
Is, as a scene, not worth the railroad's price;
But, oh, if, with "Excelsior" for device,
Thou climb thy Alpine way, each day exceeding
The other's height, what throngs would watch thy speeding
And, for the thrill thou woulds't give them, come twice!

O Canada! why all this sleigh-bell rhyming?
'Tis on the reindeer, hope, in speed with me
To the grand morning, when thou shalt breathe free
Upon the apex of thine Alpine climbing,
From foulsome, choaking smells of tyranny,
Thick from the Great Sea Serpent's inland sliming.