Tidings of the corning spring;
Every child my voice shall know
In the moon of melting snow,
When the maple’s red bud swells,
And the wind-flower lifts its bells.
As their fond companion
Men shall henceforth own your son,
And my song shall testify
That of human kin am I.”
Thus the Indian legend saith
How, at first, the robin came
With a sweeter life from death,
Bird for boy, and still the same.
If my young friends doubt that this
Is the robin’s genesis,
Not in vain is still the myth
If a truth be found therewith
Unto gentleness belong
Gifts unknown to pride and wrong;
Happier far than hate is praise,—
He who sings than he who slays.
1660.
On a painting by E. A. Abbey. The General Court
of Massachusetts enacted Oct. 19, 1658, that “any
person or persons of the cursed sect of Quakers”
should, on conviction of the same, be banished, on
pain of death, from the jurisdiction of the common-wealth.
Over the threshold of his pleasant home
Set in green clearings passed the exiled Friend,
In simple trust, misdoubting not the end.
“Dear heart of mine!” he said, “the
time has come
To trust the Lord for shelter.” One long
gaze
The goodwife turned on each familiar thing,—
The lowing kine, the orchard blossoming,
The open door that showed the hearth-fire’s
blaze,—
And calmly answered, “Yes, He will provide.”
Silent and slow they crossed the homestead’s
bound,
Lingering the longest by their child’s grave-mound.
“Move on, or stay and hang!” the sheriff
cried.
They left behind them more than home or land,
And set sad faces to an alien strand.
Safer with winds and waves than human wrath,
With ravening wolves than those whose zeal for God
Was cruelty to man, the exiles trod
Drear leagues of forest without guide or path,
Or launching frail boats on the uncharted sea,
Round storm-vexed capes, whose teeth of granite ground
The waves to foam, their perilous way they wound,
Enduring all things so their souls were free.
Oh, true confessors, shaming them who did
Anew the wrong their Pilgrim Fathers bore
For you the Mayflower spread her sail once more,
Freighted with souls, to all that duty bid
Faithful as they who sought an unknown land,
O’er wintry seas, from Holland’s Hook
of Sand!
So from his lost home to the darkening main,
Bodeful of storm, stout Macy held his way,
And, when the green shore blended with the gray,
His poor wife moaned: “Let us turn back
again.”
“Nay, woman, weak of faith, kneel down,”
said he,
And say thy prayers: the Lord himself will steer;
And led by Him, nor man nor devils I fear!
So the gray Southwicks, from a rainy sea,
Saw, far and faint, the loom of land, and gave
