The curse of religious and political apostasy lay
heavy on the land. Harlotry and atheism sat in
the high places; and the “caresses of wantons
and the jests of buffoons regulated the measures of
a government which had just ability enough to deceive,
just religion enough to persecute.” But,
while Milton mourned over this disastrous change,
no self-reproach mingled with his sorrow. To
the last he had striven against the oppressor; and
when confined to his narrow alley, a prisoner in his
own mean dwelling, like another Prometheus on his rock,
he still turned upon him an eye of unsubdued defiance.
Who, that has read his powerful appeal to his countrymen
when they were on the eve of welcoming back the tyranny
and misrule which, at the expense of so much blood
and treasure had been thrown off, can ever forget
it? How nobly does Liberty speak through him!
“If,” said he, “ye welcome back
a monarchy, it will be the triumph of all tyrants
hereafter over any people who shall resist oppression;
and their song shall then be to others, ’How
sped the rebellious English?’ but to our posterity,
’How sped the rebels, your fathers?’”
How solemn and awful is his closing paragraph!
“What I have spoken is the language of that which
is not called amiss ‘the good old cause.’
If it seem strange to any, it will not, I hope, seem
more strange than convincing to backsliders.
This much I should have said though I were sure I
should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had
none to cry to but with the prophet, ’O earth,
earth, earth!’ to tell the very soil itself
what its perverse inhabitants are deaf to; nay, though
what I have spoken should prove (which Thou suffer
not, who didst make mankind free; nor Thou next, who
didst redeem us from being servants of sin) to be
the last words of our expiring liberties.”
THE CITY OF A DAY.
The writer, when residing in Lowell, in 1843 contributed
this and the companion pieces to ‘The Stranger’
in Lowell.
This, then, is Lowell,—a city springing
up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales,
as it were in a single night, stretching far and wide
its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling
the angle of the confluence of the Concord and the
Merrimac with the sights and sounds of trade and industry.
Marvellously here have art and labor wrought their
modern miracles. I can scarcely realize the fact
that a few years ago these rivers, now tamed and subdued
to the purposes of man and charmed into slavish subjection
to the wizard of mechanism, rolled unchecked towards
the ocean the waters of the Winnipesaukee and the
rock-rimmed springs of the White Mountains, and rippled
down their falls in the wild freedom of Nature.
A stranger, in view of all this wonderful change,
feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a new
century; he seems treading on the outer circle of the
millennium of steam engines and cotton mills.
Work is here the patron saint. Everything bears
his image and superscription. Here is no place
for that respectable class of citizens called gentlemen,
and their much vilified brethren, familiarly known
as loafers. Over the gateways of this new world
Manchester glares the inscription, “Work, or
die”. Here
