And honour stood unconquer’d at the helm?
Gone! with the noble race that gave it life,
And given o’er to foreign crime and strife.
The Saxon yeoman made New-England great,
And when he leaves, he leaves it to foul fate.
No baser tribe can take his honour’d place,
And with like virtues old New-England grace.
This pow’r lies lock’d within the noble British race!
Finis April 1912
On a New England Village Seen by Moonlight
The squalid noisome village lies asleep;
The dusk and quiet hide the monstrous mill:
The bats their melancholy watches keep,
Whilst all the rabbles’ daytime cries are still.
A friendly wind, soft sweeping from the seas,
The tainted air for one brief moment clears;
A friendly moon, dim shining through the trees,
Conceals the ruin wrought by evil years.
The alien serfs escape our sorrowing view;
The tortur’d mind is lighten’d of its pain;
Our own ancestral spirits reign anew,
And old New-England seems to live again.
An idle moonbeam in the village square
Lights up the fountain and the empty green;
Plays o’er the ancient structures rotting there,
Yet veils the sad decadence of the scene.
Yon rustic cottage on the mountain’s side,
Seems still some pious farmer’s simple home;
The sordid crew, that in it now abide,
Are sunk in sleep, and swath’d in grateful gloom.
A stealthy ray illumes the mounting spire
That crowns the temple where our fathers pray’d,
But, wisely kind, the light ascends no higher,
And leaves the new-built popish cross in shade.
Where dwells that race, beneath whose rule benign
The village rich in bliss and virtue grew,
The moonlight shews us, when its pencils shine
Amongst the mounds and tablets by the yew.
The hopeful cry, that from the woes which blend
In modern times, new blessings shall emerge;
