Shame on the costly mockery of piling stone on stone
  To those who won our liberty! the heroes dead and gone! 
  While we look coldly on and see law-shielded ruffians slay
  The men who fain would win their own! the heroes of to-day! 
  Are we pledged to craven silence?  O, fling it to the wind,
  The parchment wall that bars us from the least of human kind! 
  That makes us cringe, and temporize, and dumbly stand at rest,
  While Pity’s burning flood of words is red-hot in the breast!

  We owe allegiance to the State; but deeper, truer, more,
  To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit’s core. 
  Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so; but then
  Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men!

Though we break our fathers’ promise, we have nobler duties first, The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accurst. Man is more than Constitutions.  Better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State, while we are doubly false to God!

  JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

STANZAS FOR THE TIMES.

  Shall tongues be mute, when deeds are wrought
    Which well might shame extremest hell? 
  Shall freemen lock the indignant thought? 
    Shall Pity’s bosom cease to swell? 
  Shall Honor bleed?  Shall Truth succumb? 
  Shall pen, and press, and soul be dumb?

  What! shall we guard our neighbor still. 
    While woman shrieks beneath his rod,
  And while he tramples down, at will,
    The image of a common God? 
  Shall watch and ward be round him set
  Of Northern nerve and bayonet?

  And shall we know, and share with him,
    The danger and the growing shame? 
  And see our Freedom’s light grow dim,
    Which should have filled the world with flame? 
  And, writhing, feel, where’er we turn,
  A world’s reproach around us burn?

  No!  By each spot of haunted ground,
    Where Freedom weeps her children’s fall;
  By Plymouth’s rock, and Bunker’s mound;
    By Griswold’s stained and shattered wall;
  By Warren’s ghost; by Langdon’s shade;
  By all the memories of our dead;

  By their enlarging souls, which burst
    The bands and fetters round them set;
  By the free Pilgrim spirit, nursed
    Within our bosoms yet;
  By all above, around, below,
  Be ours the indignant answer—­NO!

  J.G.  WHITTIER.

VERMONT PERSONAL LIBERTY LAW.

AN ACT TO SECURE FREEDOM TO ALL PERSONS WITHIN THIS STATE.

It is hereby enacted, &c.:

Sec. 1.  No person within this State shall be considered as property, or subject, as such, to sale, purchase, or delivery; nor shall any person, within the limits of this State, at this time, be deprived of liberty or property without due process of law.