The Poetical Writings of Fitz-Greene Halleck/Connecticut
CONNECTICUT.
FROM AN UNPUBLISHED POEM.
“The woods in which we had dwelt pleasantly rustled their green leaves in the song, and our streams were there with the sound of all their waters.”Montrose.
I.
till her gray rocks tower above the sea
That crouches at their feet, a conquered wave;
’Tis a rough land of earth, and stone, and tree,
Where breathes no castled lord or cabined slave;
Where thoughts, and tongues, and hands are bold and free,
And friends will find a welcome, foes a grave;
And where none kneel, save when to Heaven they pray,
Nor even then, unless in their own way.
II.
Theirs is a pure republic, wild, yet strong,
A “fierce democracie,” where all are true
To what themselves have voted—right or wrong—
And to their laws denominated blue;
(If red, they might to Draco’s code belong;)
A vestal state, which power could not subdue,
Nor promise win—like her own eagle’s nest,
Sacred—the San Marino of the West.
III.
A justice of the peace, for the time being,
They bow to, but may turn him out next year;
They reverence their priest, but disagreeing
In price or creed, dismiss him without fear;
They have a natural talent for foreseeing
And knowing all things; and should Park appear
From his long tour in Africa, to show
The Niger’s source, they’d meet him with—“we know.”
IV.
They love their land, because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Would shake hands with a king upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his majesty;
A stubborn race, fearing and flattering none.
Such are they nurtured, such they live and die;
All—but a few apostates, who are meddling
With merchandise, pounds, shillings, pence, and peddling;
V.
Or wandering through the Southern countries teaching
The A B C from Webster’s spelling-book;
Gallant and godly, making love and preaching,
And gaining by what they call “hook and crook,”
And what the moralists call overreaching,
A decent living. The Virginians look
Upon them with as favorable eyes
As Gabriel on the devil in paradise.
VI.
But these are but their outcasts. View them near
At home, where all their worth and pride is placed;
And there their hospitable fires burn clear,
And there the lowliest farmhouse hearth is graced
With manly hearts, in piety sincere,
Faithful in love, in honor stern and chaste,
In friendship warm and true, in danger brave,
Beloved in life, and sainted in the grave.
VII.
And minds have there been nurtured, whose control
Is felt even in their nation’s destiny;
Men who swayed senates with a statesman’s soul,
And looked on armies with a leader’s eye;
Names that adorn and dignify the scroll,
Whose leaves contain their country’s history,
And tales of love and war—listen to one
Of the Green-Mountaineer—the Stark of Bennington.
VIII.
When on that field his band the Hessians fought,
Briefly he spoke before the fight began:
“Soldiers! those German gentlemen are bought
For four pounds eight and sevenpence per man,
By England’s king; a bargain, as is thought.
Are we worth more? Let’s prove it now we can;
For we must beat them, boys, ere set of sun,
Or Mary Stark’s a widow.” It was done.
IX.
Hers are not Tempe’s nor Arcadia’s spring,
Nor the long summer of Cathayan vales,
The vines, the flowers, the air, the skies, that fling
Such wild enchantment o’er Boccaccio’s tales
Of Florence and the Arno; yet the wing
Of life’s best angel, Health, is on her gales
Through sun and snow; and in the autumn-time
Earth has no purer and no lovelier clime.
X.
Her clear, warm heaven at noon—the mist that shrouds
Her twilight hills—her cool and starry eves,
The glorious splendor of her sunset clouds,
The rainbow beauty of her forest-leaves,
Come o’er the eye, in solitude and crowds,
Where’er his web of song her poet weaves;
And his mind’s brightest vision but displays
The autumn scenery of his boyhood’s days.
XI.
And when you dream of woman, and her love;
Her truth, her tenderness, her gentle power;
The maiden listening in the moonlight grove,
The mother smiling in her infant’s bower;
Forms, features, worshipped while we breathe or move,
Be by some spirit of your dreaming hour
Borne, like Loretto’s chapel, through the air
To the green land I sing, then wake, you’ll find them there.
XII.
****** ******
XIII.
They burnt their last witch in Connecticut
About a century and a half ago;
They made a school-house of her forfeit hut,
And gave a pitying sweet-brier leave to grow
Above her thankless ashes; and they put
A certified description of the show
Between two weeping-willows, craped with black,
On the last page of that year’s almanac.
XIV.
Some warning and well-meant remarks were made
Upon the subject by the weekly printers;
The people murmured at the taxes laid
To pay for jurymen and pitch-pine splinters,
And the sad story made the rose-leaf fade
Upon young listeners’ cheeks for several winters,
When told at fire-side eves by those who saw
Executed—the lady and the law.
XV.
She and the law found rest: years rose and set;
That generation, cottagers and kings,
Slept with their fathers, and the violet
Has mourned above their graves a hundred springs:
Few persons keep a file of the Gazette,
And almanacs are sublunary things,
So that her fame is almost lost to earth,
As if she ne’er had breathed; and of her birth,
XVI.
And death, and lonely life’s mysterious matters,
And how she played, in our forefathers’ times,
The very devil with their sons and daughters;
And how those “delicate Ariels” of her crimes,
The spirits of the rocks, and woods, and waters,
Obeyed her bidding when in charmed rhymes,
She muttered, at deep midnight, spells whose power
Woke from brief dream of dew the sleeping summer flower,
XVII.
And hushed the night-bird’s solitary hymn,
And spoke in whispers to the forest-tree,
Till his awed branches trembled, leaf and limb,
And grouped her churchyard shapes of fantasie
Round merry moonlight’s meadow-fountain’s brim,
And mocking for a space the dread decree,
Brought back to dead, cold lips the parted breath,
And changed to banquet-board the bier of death,
XVIII.
None knew—except a patient, precious few,
Who’ve read the folios of one Cotton Mather,
A chronicler of tales more strange than true,
New-England’s chaplain, and her history’s father;
A second Monmouth’s Geoffrey, a new
Herodotus, their laurelled victor rather,
For in one art he soars above them high:
The Greek or Welshman does not always lie.
XIX.
Know ye the venerable Cotton? He
Was the first publisher’s tourist on this station;
The first who made, by labelling earth and sea,
A huge book, and a handsome speculation:
And ours was then a land of mystery,
Fit theme for poetry’s exaggeration,
The wildest wonder of the month; and there
He wandered freely, like a bird or bear,
XX.
And wove his forest dreams into quaint prose,
Our sires his heroes, where, in holy strife,
They treacherously war with friends and foes;
Where meek religion wears the assassin’s knife,
And “bids the desert blossom like the rose,”
By sprinkling earth with blood of Indian life,
And rears her altars o’er the indignant bones
Of murdered maidens, wives, and little ones.
XXI.
Herod of Galilee’s babe-butchering deed
Lives not on history’s blushing page alone;
Our skies, it seems, have seen like victims bleed,
And our own Ramahs echoed groan for groan:
The fiends of France, whose cruelties decreed
Those dextrous drownings in the Loire and Rhone,
Were at their worst, but copyists second-hand
Of our shrined, sainted sires, the Plymouth pilgrim-band,
XXII.
Or else fibs Mather. Kindred wolves have bayed
Truth’s moon in chorus, but believe them not!
Beneath the dark trees that the Lethe shade,
Be he, his folios, followers, facts, forgot;
And let his perishing monument be made
Of his own unsold volumes: ’tis the lot
Of many, may be mine; and be it Mather’s,
That slanderer of the memory of our fathers.
XXIII.
And who were they, our fathers? In their veins
Ran the best blood of England’s gentlemen;
Her bravest in the strife on battle-plains,
Her wisest in the strife of voice and pen;
Her holiest, teaching, in her holiest fanes,
The lore that led to martyrdom; and when
On this side ocean slept their wearied sails,
And their toil-bells woke up our thousand hills and dales,
XXIV.
Shamed they their fathers? Ask the village-spires
Above their Sabbath-homes of praise and prayer;
Ask of their children’s happy household-fires,
And happier harvest noons; ask summer’s air,
Made merry by young voices, when the wires
Of their school-cages are unloosed, and dare
Their slanderers’ breath to blight the memory
That o’er their graves is “growing green to see!”
XXV.
If he has “writ their annals true;” if they,
The Christian-sponsored and the Christian-nursed,
Clouded with crime the sunset of their day
And warmed their winter’s hearths with fires accursed;
And if the stain that time wears not away
Of guilt was on the pilgrim axe that first
Our wood-paths’ roses blest with smiles from heaven,
In charity forget, and hope to be forgiven.
XXVI.
Forget their story’s cruelty and wrong;
Forget their story-teller; or but deem
His facts the fictions of a minstrel’s song,
The myths and marvels of a poet’s dream.
And are they not such? Suddenly among
My mind’s dark thoughts its boyhood’s sunrise beam
Breathes in spring balm and beauty o’er my page—
Joy! joy! my patriot wrath hath wronged the reverend sage.
XXVII.
Welcome! young boyhood, welcome! Of thy lore,
Thy morning-gathered wealth of prose and rhyme,
Of fruit the flower, of gold the infant ore,
The roughest shuns not manhood’s stormy clime,
But loves wild ocean’s winds and breakers’ roar;
While, of the blossoms of the sweet spring-time,
The bonniest, and most bountiful of joy,
Shrink from the man, and cling around the boy.
XXVIII.
But now, like doves “with healing on their wings,”
Blossom and fruit with gladdening kindness come,
Charming to sleep my murmuring song, that sings
Unworthy dirges over Mather’s tomb:
Welcome the olive-branch their message brings!
It bids me wish him not the mouldering doom
Of nameless scribes of “mémoires pour servir,”
Dishonest “chroniclers of time’s small-beer.”
XXIX.
No: a born Poet, at his cradle-fire
The muses nursed him as their bud unblown,
And gave him as his mind grew high and higher,
Their ducal strawberry-leafs enwreathed renown.
Alas! that mightiest masters of the lyre,
Whose pens above an eagle’s heart have grown,
In all the proud nobility of wing,
Should stoop to dip their points in passion’s poison-spring!
XXX.
Yet Milton, weary of his youth’s young wife,
To her, to king, to church, to law untrue,
Warred for divorce and discord to the knife,
And proudest wore his plume of darkest hue:
And Dante, when his Florence, in her strife,
Robbed him of office and his temper, threw
’Mongst friends and foes a bomb-shell of fierce rhymes,
Shivering their names and fames to all succeeding times.
XXXI.
And our own Mather’s fire-and-fagot tale
Of Conquest, with her “garments rolled in blood,”
And banners blackening, like a pirate’s sail,
The Mayflower’s memories of the brave and good,
Though but a brain-born dream of rain and hail,
And in his epic but an episode,
Proves mournfully the strange and sad admission
Of much sour grape-juice in his disposition.
XXXII.
O Genius! powerful with thy praise or blame,
When art thou feigning? when art thou sincere?
Mather, who banned his living friends with shame,
In funeral-sermons blessed them on their bier,
And made their death-beds beautiful with fame—
Fame true and gracious as a widow’s tear
To her departed darling husband given;
Him whom she scolded up from earth to heaven.
XXXIII.
Thanks for his funeral-sermons; they recall
The sunshine smiling through his folio’s leaves,
That makes his readers’ hours in bower or hall
Joyous as plighted hearts on bridal eves;
Chasing, like music from the soul of Saul,
The doubt that darkens, and the ill that grieves;
And honoring the author’s heart and mind,
That beats to bless, and toils to ennoble human kind.
XXXIV.
His chaplain-mantle worthily to wear,
He fringed its sober gray with poet-bays,
And versed the Psalms of David to the air
Of Yankee-Doodle, for Thanksgiving-days;
Thus hallowing with the earnestness of prayer,
And patriotic purity of praise,
Unconscious of irreverence or wrong,
Our manliest battle-tune and merriest bridal song.
XXXV.
The good the Rhine-song does to German hearts,
Or thine, Marseilles! to France’s fiery blood;
The good thy anthemed harmony imparts,
“God save the Queen!” to England’s field and flood,
A home-born blessing, Nature’s boon, not Art’s;
The same heart-cheering, spirit-warming good,
To us and ours, where’er we war or woo,
Thy words and music, Yankee-Doodle!—do.
XXXVI.
Beneath thy Star, as one of the Thirteen,
Land of my lay! through many a battle’s night
Thy gallant men stepped steady and serene,
To that war-music’s stern and strong delight.
Where bayonets clinched above the trampled green,
Where sabres grappled in the ocean-fight;
In siege, in storm, on deck or rampart, there
They hunted the wolf Danger to his lair,
And sought and won sweet Peace, and wreaths for Honor’s hair!
XXXVII.
And with thy smiles, sweet Peace, came woman’s, bringing
The Eden-sunshine of her welcome kiss,
And lovers’ flutes, and children’s voices singing
The maiden’s promised, matron’s perfect bliss,
And heart and home-bells blending with their ringing
Thank-offerings borne to holier worlds than this,
And the proud green of Glory’s laurel-leaves,
And gold, the gift to Peace, of Plenty’s summer sheaves.