Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

if he has seized our coat, we shall surrender up our cloak, rather than subject him to punishment.

We believe that the penal code of the old covenant, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, has been abrogated by Jesus Christ; and that, under the new covenant, the forgiveness, instead of the punishment of enemies, has been enjoined upon all disciples, in all cases whatsoever. To extort money from enemies, or set them upon a pillory, or cast them into prison, or hang them upon a gallows, is obviously not to forgive, but to take retribution. Vengeance is mine-I will repay, saith the Lord.

swords shall be beaten into plough shares, and spears into pruning-hooks, and men shall not learn the art of war any more, it follows that all who manufacture, sell, or wield those deadly weapons, do thus array themselves against the peaceful dominion of the Son of God on earth.

Having thus briefly, but frankly, stated our prin|ciples and purposes, we proceed to specify the measures we propose to adopt, in carrying our object into effect.

We expect to prevail through the foolishness of preaching-striving to commend ourselves unto eveThe history of mankind is crowded with evidences, ry man's conscience, in the sight of God. From the proving that physical coercion is not adapted to press we shall promulgate our sentiments as widely moral regeneration; that the sinful dispositions of as practicable. We shall endeavor to secure the man can be subdued only by love; that evil can be co-operation of all persons, of whatever name or exterminated from the earth only by goodness; that sect. The triumphant progress of the cause of it is not safe to rely upon an arm of flesh, upon man Temperance and of Abolition in our land, through whose breath is in his nostrils, to preserve us from the instrumentality of benevolent and voluntary harm; that there is great security in being gentle, associations, encourages us to combine our own harmless, long-suffering, and abundant in mercy; means and efforts for the promotion of a still greater that it is only the meek who shall inherit the earth, | cause. Hence we shall employ lecturers, circulate for the violent, who resort to the sword, shall perish | tracts and publications, form societies, and petition with the sword. Hence, as a measure of sound our state and national governments in relation to policy, of safety to property, of life, and liber- the subject of Universal Peace. It will be our leadty,—of public quietude and private enjoyment,-asing object to devise ways and means for effecting a well as on the ground of allegiance to Him who is radical change in the views, feelings and practices King of kings, and Lord of lords,—we cordially | of society, respecting the sinfulness of war, and the adopt the non-resistance principle; being confident treatment of enemies. that it provides for all possible consequences, will ensure all things needful to us, is armed with omnipotent power, and must ultimately triumph over every assailing force.

We advocate no jacobinical doctrines. The spirit of jacobinism is the spirit of retaliation, violence and murder. It neither fears God, nor regards man. We would be filled with the spirit of Christ. If we abide by our principles, it is impossible for us to be disorderly, or plot treason, or participate in any evil work:-we shall submit to every ordinance of man, for the Lord's sake; obey all the requirements of government, except such as we deem contrary to the commands of the gospel; and in no wise resist the operation of law, except by meekly submitting to the penalty of disobedience.

In entering upon the great work before us, we are not unmindful that, in its prosecution, we may be called to test our sincerity, even as in a fiery ordeal. It may subject us to insult, outrage, suffering, yea, even death itself. We anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, calumny. Tumults may arise against us. The ungodly and violent, the proud and pharisaical, the ambitious and tyrannical, principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places, may combine to crush us. So they treated the Messiah, whose example we are humbly striving to imitate. If we suffer with him, we know that we shall reign with him. We shall not be afraid of their terror, neither be troubled. Our confidence is in the Lord Almighty, not in man. Having withdrawn from human protection, what can sustain us but that faith which overcomes the world? We shall not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try us, as though some strange thing had happened unto us; but rejoice, in

But, while we shall adhere to the doctrine of nonresistance and passive submission to enemies, we purpose, in a moral and spiritual sense, to speak and act boldly in the cause of God; to assail inquity in high places and in low places; to apply our princi-asmuch as we are partakers of Christ's sufferings. ples to all existing, civil, political, legal, and ecclesiastical institutions; and to hasten the time, when the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever.

Wherefore, we commit the keeping of our souls to God, in well-doing, as unto a faithful Creator. For every one that forsakes houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for Christ's sake, shall receive an hundred fold, and shall

It appears to us a self-evident truth, that, what-inherit everlasting life. ever the gospel is designed to destroy at any period of the world, being contrary to it, ought now to be abandoned. If, then, the time is predicted, when

Firmly relying upon the certain and universal triumph of the sentiments contained in this Declaration, however formidable may be the opposition ar.

[blocks in formation]

ABSENCE.

BY FRANCES A. BUTLER.

What shall I do with all the days and hours
That must be counted ere I see thy face?
How shall I charm the interval that lowers
Between this time and that sweet time of grace?
Shall I in slumber steep each weary sense,
Weary with longing?-shall I flee away
Into past days, and with some fond pretence
Cheat myself to forget the present day?

Shall love for thee lay on my soul the sin

Of casting from me God's great gift of time; Shall I, these mists of memory locked within, Leave, and forget, life's purposes sublime?

Oh! how, or by what means, may I contrive

To bring the hour that brings thee back more near? How may I teach my drooping hope to live

Until that blessed time, and thou art here?

I'll tell thee for thy sake, I will lay hold
Of all good aims, and consecrate to thee,
In worthy deeds, each moment that is told
While thou, beloved one! art far from me.
For thee, I will arouse my thoughts to try

All heavenward flights, all high and holy strains;
For thy dear sake, I will walk patiently
Through these long hours, nor call their minutes
pains.

I will this dreary blank of absence make
A noble task-time, and will therein strive

To follow excellence, and to o'ertake
More good than I have won since yet I live.
So may this doomed time build up in me

A thousand graces which shall thus be thine;
So may my love and longing hallowed be,
And thy dear thought an influence divine.

TO AN INFANT.

BY WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

Fair bud of being! blossoming like the rose—
Leaf upon leaf unfolding to the eye,
In fragrance rich and spotless purity-
That hourly dost some latent charm disclose ;-
O may the dews and gentle rains of Heaven
Give to thy root immortal sustenance;
So thou in matchless beauty shalt advance,
Nor by the storms of life be rudely driven.
But if, O envious Death! this little flower

Thou from its tender stem untimely break, An Angel shall the drooping victim take, And quick transplant it to a heavenly bower, Where it shall flourish in eternal Spring, Nurtured beneath the eye of a paternal KING.

No. 13.

TO M. W.

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

L'Envoi, to a Volume of Poems.

Whether my heart hath wiser grown or not,
In these three years, since I to thee inscribed,
Mine own betrothed, the firstlings of my muse,—
Poor windfalls of unripe experience,

Young buds plucked hastily by childish hands
Not patient to await more full-blown flowers,—
At least it hath seen more of life and men,
And pondered more, and grown a shade more sad;
Yet with no less of hope or settled trust
In the benignness of that Providence,
Which shapes from out our elements awry
The grace and order that we wonder at,
The mystic harmony of right and wrong,
Both working out His wisdom and our good:
A trust, Beloved, chiefly learned of thee,
Who hast that gift of patient tenderness,
The instinctive wisdom of a woman's heart,
Which, seeing Right, can yet forget the Wrong,
And, strong itself to comfort and sustain,
Yet leans with full-confiding piety
On the great Spirit that enriches all.

Less of that feeling, which the world calls love,
Thou findest in my verse, but haply more
Of a more precious virtue, born of that,
The love of God, of Freedom, and of Man.
Thou knowest well what these three years have been,
How we have filled and graced each other's hearts,
And every day grown fuller of that bliss,
Which, even at first, seemed more than we could bear,
And thou, meantime, unchanged, except it be
That thy large heart is larger, and thine eyes
Of palest blue, more tender with the lore
Which taught me first how good it was to love;
And, if thy blessed name occur less oft,
Yet thou canst see the shadow of thy soul
In all my song, and art well-pleased to feel
That I could ne'er be rightly true to thee,
If I were recreant to higher aims.
Thou didst not grant to me so rich a fief
As thy full love, on any harder tenure
Than that of rendering thee a single heart;
And I do service for thy queenly gift
Then best, when I obey my soul, and tread
In reverence the path she beckons me.

'T were joy enough,—if I could think that life Were but a barren struggle after joy,—

To live, and love, and never look beyond
The fair horizon of thy bounteous heart,
Whose sunny circle stretches wide enough
For me to find a heaped contentment in;
To do naught else but garner every hour
My golden harvest of sweet memories,
And count my boundless revenue of smiles
And happy looks, and words so kind and gentle
That each doth seem the first to give thy heart,-
Content to let my waveless soul flow on,
Reflecting but the spring-time on its brink,

And thy clear spirit bending like a sky
O'er it, secure that from thy virgin hands
My brows shall never lack their dearest wreath :
But life hath nobler destinies than this,
Which but to strive for is reward enough,
Which to attain is all earth gives of peace.
Thou art not of those niggard souls, who deem
That Poesy is but to jingle words,
To string sweet sorrows for apologies
To hide the barrenness of unfurnished hearts,
To prate about the surfaces of things,
And make more threadbare what was quite worn out :
Our common thoughts are deepest, and to give
Such beauteous tones to these, as needs must take
Men's hearts their captives to the end of time,
So that who hath not the choice gift of words
Takes these into his soul, as welcome friends,
To make sweet music of his joys and woes,
And be all Beauty's swift interpreters,
Links of bright gold 'twixt nature and his heart,
This is the errand high of Poesy.

The day has long gone by wherein 't was thought
That men were greater poets, inasmuch
As they were more unlike their fellow-men:
The poet sees beyond, but dwells among,
The wearing turmoil of our work-day life;
His heart not differs from another heart,
But rather in itself enfolds the whole
Felt by the hearts about him, high or low,
Hath deeper sympathies and clearer sight,
And is more like a human heart than all;
His larger portion is but harmony
Of heart, the all-potent alchemy that turns
The humblest things to golden inspiration;
A loving eye's unmatched sovereignty;
A self-sustained, enduring humbleness;
A reverence for woman; a deep faith

In gentleness, as strength's least doubtful proof;
And an electric sympathy with love,
Heaven's first great message to all noble souls.

25

But, if the poet's duty be to tell

His fellow-men their beauty and their strength,
And show them the deep meaning of their souls,
He also is ordained to higher things;
He must reflect his race's struggling heart,
And shape the crude conceptions of his age.
They tell us that our land was made for song,
With its huge rivers and sky-piercing peaks,
Its sea-like lakes and mighty cataracts,
Its forests vast and hoar, and prairies wide,
And mounds that tell of wondrous tribes extinct;
But Poesy springs not from rocks and woods;
Her womb and cradle are the human heart,
And she can find a nobler theme for song
In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight,
Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore
Between the frozen deserts of the poles.
All nations have their message from on high,
Each the messiah of some central thought,
For the fulfilment and delight of Man :
One has to teach that Labor is divine;
Another, Freedom; and another, Mind;
And all, that God is open-eyed and just,
The happy centre and calm heart of all.

Our new Atlantis, like a morning-star,
Silvers the murk face of slow-yielding Night,
The herald of a fuller truth than yet

Hath gleamed upon the upraised face of Man
Since the earth glittered in her stainless prime,-
Of a more glorious sunrise than of old

Drew wondrous melodies from Memnon huge,
Yea, draws them still, though now he sits waist-deep
In the engulfing flood of whirling sand,
And looks across the wastes of endless gray,
Sole wreck, where once his hundred-gated Thebes
Pained with her mighty hum the calm, blue heaven:
Shall the dull stone pay grateful orisons,

And we till noonday bar the splendor out,
Lest it reproach and chide our sluggard hearts,
Warm-nestled in the down of Prejudice,
And be content, though clad with angel-wings,
Close-clipped, to hop about from perch to perch,
In paltry cages of dead men's dead thoughts?
O, rather, like the sky-lark, soar and sing,
And let our gushing songs befit the dawn

And sunrise, and the yet unshaken dew
Brimming the chalice of each full-blown hope,
Whose blithe front turns to greet the growing day!
Never had poets such high call before,

Are, then, our woods, our mountains, and our Never can poets hope for higher one.

streams,

Needful to teach our poets how to sing?

O, maiden rare, far other thoughts were ours,
When we have sat by ocean's foaming marge,
And watched the waves leap roaring on the rocks,
Than young Leander and his Hero had,
Gazing from Sestos to the other shore.

The moon looks down and ocean worships her,
Stars rise and set, and seasons come and go
Even as they did in Homer's elder time,
But we behold them not with Grecian eyes:
Then they were types of beauty and of strength,
But now of freedom, unconfined and pure,
Subject alone to Order's higher law.

What cares the Russian serf or Southern slave,
Though we should speak as man spake never yet
Of gleaming Hudson's broad magnificence,
Or green Niagara's never-ending roar?
Our country hath a gospel of her own

To preach and practice before all the world,-
The freedom and divinity of man,
The glorious claims of human brotherhood,—
Which to pay nobly, as a freeman should,
Gains the sole wealth that will not fly away,—
And the soul's fealty to none but God.
These are realities, which make the shows
Of outward Nature, be they ne'er so grand,
Seem small, and worthless, and contemptible:
These are the mountain-summits for our bards,
Which stretch far upward into heaven itself,?
And give such wide-spread and exulting view
Of hope, and faith, and onward destiny,
That shrunk Parnassus to a molehill dwindles.

And, if they be but faithful to their trust,
Earth will remember them with love and joy,
And, O, far better, God will not forget.
For he who settles Freedom's principles
Writes the death-warrant of all tyranny;
Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart,
And his mere word makes despots tremble more
Than ever Brutus with his dagger could.
Wait for no hints from waterfalls or woods,
Nor dream that tales of red men, brute and fierce,
Repay the finding of this Western World,
Or needed half the globe to give them birth:
Spirit supreme of Freedom! not for this
Did great Columbus tame his eagle soul
To jostle with the daws that perch in courts;
Not for this, friendless, on an unknown sea,
Coping with mad waves and more mutinous spirits,
Battled he with the dreadful ache at heart
Which tempts, with devilish subtleties of doubt,
The hermit of that loneliest solitude,
The silent desert of a great New Thought:
Though loud Niagara were to-day struck dumb,
Yet would this cataract of boiling life
Rush plunging on and on to endless deeps,
And utter thunder till the world shall cease,-
A thunder worthy of the poet's song,
And which alone can fill it with true life.
The high evangel to our country granted
Could make apostles, yea, with tongues of fire,
Of hearts half-darkened back again to clay!
'T is the soul only that is national,
And he who pays true loyalty to that
Alone can claim the wreath of patriotism.

Beloved! if I wander far and oft
From that which I believe, and feel, and know,
Thou wilt forgive, not with a sorrowing heart,
But with a strengthened hope of better things;
Knowing that I, though often blind and false
To those I love, and, O, more false than all
Unto myself, have been most true to thee,
And that whoso in one thing hath been true
Can be as true in all. Therefore thy hope
May yet not prove unfruitful, and thy love
Meet, day by day, with less unworthy thanks,
Whether, as now, we journey hand in hand,
Or, parted in the body, yet are one
In spirit and the love of holy things.

DEFORMING-REFORMING.

BY LYDIA MARIA CHILD.

the midst of such calm, bright influences. Man may curse, but Nature for ever blesses. The guiltiest of her wandering children she would fain enfold within her arms to the friendly heart-warmth of a mother's bosom. She speaks to them ever in the soft, low tones of earnest love; but they, alas, tossed on the roaring, stunning surge of society, forget the quiet language.

As usual, the organ of justice (which phrenologists say is unusually developed in my head) was roused into great activity by the sight of prisoners. Would you have them prey on Society?' said one

As I looked up at the massive walls of the prison, it did my heart good to see doves nestling within the shelter of the deep, narrow, grated windows. I thought what blessed little messengers of heaven they would appear to me, if I were in prison; but instantly a shadow passed over the sunshine of my thought. Alas, doves do not speak to their souls, as they would to mine; for they have lost their love for child-like, and gentle things. How have they lost it? Society with its unequal distribution, its perverted education, its manifold injustice, its cold neglect, its biting mockery, has taken from them the gifts of God. They are placed here, in the midst of I went last week to Blackwell's Island, in the green hills, and flowing streams, and cooing doves, East River, between the city and Long Island. The after the heart is petrified against the genial influenvirons of the city are unusually beautiful, consi-ence of all such sights and sounds. dering how far Autumn has advanced upon us. Frequent rains have coaxed vegetation into abundance, and preserved it in verdant beauty. The trees are hung with a profusion of vines, the rocks are dressed in nature's green velvet of moss, and from every lit-of my companions. I answered, I am troubled that tle cleft peeps the rich foliage of some wind scattered seed. The island itself presents a quiet loveliness of scenery, unsurpassed by anything I have ever witnessed; though Nature and I are old friends, and she has shown me many of her choicest pictures, in a light let in only from above. No form of gracefulness can compare with the bend of flowing waters all round and round a verdant island. The circle typifies Love; and they who read the spiritual alpha-ther, who could stand before him?' bet, will see that a circle of waters must needs be While I was there, they brought in the editors of very beautiful. Beautiful it is, even when the lan- the Flash, the Libertine, and the Weekly Rake. My guage it speaks is an unknown tongue. Then the very soul loathes such polluted publications; yet a green hills beyond look so very pleasant in the sun- sense of justice again made me refractory. These shine, with homes nestling among them, like dimples men were perhaps trained to such service by all the on a smiling face. The island itself abounds with social influences they had ever known. They dared charming nooks-open wells in shady places, screen-to publish what nine-tenths of all around them lived ed by large weeping willows; gardens and arbors unreproved. Why should they be imprisoned, while running down to the river's edge, to look at themflourished in the full tide of editorial

society has preyed upon them. I will not enter into an argument about the right of society to punish these sinners; but I say she made them sinners. How much I have done toward it, by yielding to popular prejudices, obeying false customs, and suppressing vital truths, I know not; but doubtless 1 have done, and am doing, my share. God forgive me. If He dealt with us, as we deal with our bro

selves in the waters; and pretty boats, like white-success, circulating a paper as immoral, and perwinged birds, chased by their shadows, and breaking haps more dangerous, because its indecency is slightthe waves into gems.

But man has profaned this charming retreat. He has brought the screech-owl, the bat, and the vulture, into the holy temple of Nature. The island belongs to government; and the only buildings on it are penitentiary, mad-house, and hospital; with a few dwellings occupied by people connected with those institutions. The discord between man and nature never before struck me so painfully; yet it is wise and kind to place the erring and the diseased in

ly veiled? Why should the Weekly Rake be shut up, when daily rakes walk Broadway in fine broadcloth and silk velvet?

[merged small][merged small][ocr errors]
« AnteriorContinuar »