Why come they not? why comes not she I know my mother loves me ! BIGOTRY. WHEN calm minds strongly shoot into the night light, That casts in silence round its useful beams. Not so, when Zealots twang into the dark, Flight after flight, their mischief-whizzing spears; Except by them whose barns and corn-ricks are insured. DON AND ROTHER. AGAIN we meet, where often we have met, We meet again, to talk, with vain regret, We meet again-perchance to meet no more! I hear a voice, unvoyaged billows o'er, "Depart!" it cries. "Why linger on the stage Have I not read thee, even from youth to age? "Depart, pale Drone! What fruit-producing flower Hast thou rear'd on the plain? What useful moments count'st thou in thine hour? What victim hast thou snatch'd from cruel power? What tyrant slain?" I will obey the power whom all obey. Yes, Rivers of the heart! O'er that blind deep, where morning casts no ray I will depart. But first, O Rivers of my childhood! first For on your banks my infant thoughts were nursed; When life was new. Before my fingers learn'd to play with flowers, Ere my tongue lisp'd, amid your dewy bowers, When, in my mother's arms, an infant frail, My blue eye caught your glimmer in the vale, Ye saw my feelings round that mother grow, Then thought, with danger came, and flower'd like woe! But deeds, the fervent deeds that blush and glow, Are Virtue's fruit. From infancy to youth; from schoolboy days, When life with stones and flowers Sports, like the stream that with the sunbeam plays Till age counts fearfully his number'd days— We waste our powers. What doth the man but what the child hath done? We live, we talk, we move! The best of all who prate beneath the sun; And if the best are like the useless gem Heavy, on those who crush the useful stem- Who bruise the weak, but bind no broken reed; Who, flowerless, ban the flower, to plant the weed; Can I not crush them? No. Then, warning voice, I cannot crush them. Let me then rejoice Is it not love, to loathe the loveless? Yea, The love of angels for their God!--Away! They love not God, who do not hate man's foes, But deep as Hell and blacker. To loathe those Ah! many a blossom of the holy tree Poland! the tears of nations flow for thee! In dust is laid! But hath no hope cheer'd man's despair since first I trod thy margin, Don? Yea, mighty links of evil's chain are burst; And they who curse, and will not bless, accursed Fall, one by one. Though Poland bleeds where Kosciusko died, To thrones, crime-sceptred, "Lo, you are defied!" |