Page:Poems Cook.djvu/263

I gave the fire that melted down the fetters of the slave,
And struck a qualing terror to the trampling despot knave—
I was the beacon flame that rose when chains and Gesler fell,
And the bonnie Greenwood Fagot shone on Liberty and Tell.

Oh! a bonnie thing am I, when the woodman binds me up,
For he takes me with the green leaf and the tawny acorn cup;
He takes me from the forest, where I brush the red deer's horn,
Where the sweetest and the richest of Spring's violets are born.
Nought fresher and nought fairer can be found upon the earth,
For May flowers and April rainbows come to hail me at my birth:
And the bonnie Greenwood Fagot, with its blossoms and its sprays,
Deserves a song in Winter nights and Summer's merry days.

 

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DUST.

 Dust! dust thou art old in fame,
For Man gain'd from thee his form and his name;
And though proud he may be of his noble line,
The haughtiest race are but sons of thine.
Thou wert the food of the first false thing
That glozingly coil'd with the hidden sting:
Thou wert cursed, and that curse is existing now,
While the furrow is moist with "the sweat of the brow."
Thou chokest the artisan over his toil,
Thou dwellest with skulls on the dead-strewn soil:
 Dust! dust! who shall distrust
Mingling with thee, and the moth, and the rust?

Heroes that look on ten thousand foes
With unshifting gaze and a firm repose,
From the coming dust will turn and shrink,
With retreating step and a cowardly wink.

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