Still through each change of fortune strange,
    Racked nerve, and brain all burning,
  His loving faith in mother-land
    Knew never shade of turning;
  By Britain’s lakes, by Neva’s wave,
    Whatever sky was o’er him,
  He heard her rivers’ rushing sound,
    Her blue peaks rose before him.

  He held his slaves, yet made withal
    No false and vain pretenses,
  Nor paid a lying priest to seek
    For scriptural defenses. 
  His harshest words of proud rebuke,
    His bitterest taunt and scorning,
  Fell fire-like on the Northern brow
    That bent to him in fawning.

  He held his slaves, yet kept the while
    His reverence for the Human,
  In the dark vassals of his will
    He saw but man and woman. 
  No hunter of God’s outraged poor
    His Roanoke valley entered;
  No trader in the souls of men
    Across his threshold ventured.

  And when the old and wearied man
    Lay down for his last sleeping,
  And at his side, a slave no more,
    His brother-man stood weeping,
  His latest thought, his latest breath,
    To freedom’s duty giving,
  With failing tongue and trembling hand
    The dying blest the living.

  O! never bore his ancient State
    A truer son or braver;
  None trampling with a calmer scorn
    On foreign hate or favor. 
  He knew her faults, yet never stooped
    His proud and manly feeling
  To poor excuses of the wrong
    Or meanness of concealing.

  But none beheld with clearer eye,
    The plague-spot o’er her spreading,
  None heard more sure the steps of Doom
    Along her future treading. 
  For her as for himself he spake,
    When, his gaunt frame up-bracing,
  He traced with dying hand “REMORSE!”
    And perished in the tracing.

  As from the grave where Henry sleeps,
    From Vernon’s weeping willow,
  And from the grassy pall which hides
    The Sage of Monticello,
  So from the leaf-strewn burial-stone
    Of Randolph’s lowly dwelling,
  Virginia! o’er thy land of slaves
    A warning voice is swelling.

  And hark! from thy deserted fields
    Are sadder warnings spoken,
  From quenched hearths, where thy exiled sons
    Their household gods have broken. 
  The curse is on thee—­wolves for men,
    And briers for corn-sheaves giving! 
  O! more than all thy dead renown
    Were now one hero living.

  OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

  OLD IRONSIDES.

  Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! 
    Long has it waved on high,
  And many an eye has danced to see
    That banner in the sky;
  Beneath it rung the battle shout,
    And burst the cannon’s roar;
  The meteor of the ocean air
    Shall sweep the clouds no more.