“‘Let there be Liberty!’
God said, and, lo!
The red skies all were luminous.
The glow
Struck first Columbia’s
kindling mountain peaks
One hundred and eleven years ago!”
So sang a patriot whom once I saw
Descending Bunker’s holy hill.
With awe
I noted that he shone with
sacred light,
Like Moses with the tables of the Law.
One hundred and eleven years? O small
And paltry period compared with all
The tide of centuries that
flowed and ebbed
To etch Yosemite’s divided wall!
Ah, Liberty, they sing you always young
Whose harps are in your adoration strung
(Each swears you are his countrywoman,
too,
And speak no language but his mother tongue).
And truly, lass, although with shout and
horn
Man has all-hailed you from creation’s
morn,
I cannot think you old—I
think, indeed,
You are by twenty centuries unborn.
1886.
THE PASSING OF “BOSS” SHEPHERD.
The sullen church-bell’s intermittent
moan,
The dirge’s melancholy monotone,
The measured march, the drooping flags,
attest
A great man’s progress to his place
of rest.
Along broad avenues himself decreed
To serve his fellow men’s disputed
need—
Past parks he raped away from robbers’
thrift
And gave to poverty, wherein to lift
Its voice to curse the giver and the gift—
Past noble structures that he reared for
men
To meet in and revile him, tongue and
pen,
Draws the long retinue of death to show
The fit credentials of a proper woe.
“Boss” Shepherd, you are dead.
Your hand no more
Throws largess to the mobs that ramp and
roar
For blood of benefactors who disdain
Their purity of purpose to explain,
Their righteous motive and their scorn
of gain.
Your period of dream—’twas
but a breath—
Is closed in the indifference of death.
Sealed in your silences, to you alike
If hands are lifted to applaud or strike.
No more to your dull, inattentive ear
Praise of to-day than curse of yesteryear.
From the same lips the honied phrases
fall
That still are bitter from cascades of
gall.
We note the shame; you in your depth of
dark
The red-writ testimony cannot mark
On every honest cheek; your senses all
Locked, incommunicado, in your
pall,
Know not who sit and blush, who stand
and bawl.
“Seven Grecian cities claim great
Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged
his
bread.”
So sang, as if the thought had been his
own,
An unknown bard, improving on a known.
“Neglected genius!”—that
is sad indeed,
But malice better would ignore than heed,
And Shepherd’s soul, we rightly
may suspect,
Prayed often for the mercy of neglect
When hardly did he dare to leave his door
Without a guard behind him and before
To save him from the gentlemen that now
In cheap and easy reparation bow
Their corrigible heads above his corse
To counterfeit a grief that’s half
remorse.
The pageant passes and the exile sleeps,
And well his tongue the solemn secret
keeps
Of the great peace he found afar, until,
Death’s writ of extradition to fulfill,
They brought him, helpless, from that
friendly zone
To be a show and pastime in his own—
A final opportunity to those
Who fling with equal aim the stone and
rose;
That at the living till his soul is freed,
This at the body to conceal the deed!
Lone on his hill he’s lying to await
What added honors may befit his state—
The monument, the statue, or the arch
(Where knaves may come to weep and dupes
to march)
Builded by clowns to brutalize the scenes
His genius beautified. To get the
means,
His newly good traducers all are dunned
For contributions to the conscience fund.
If each subscribe (and pay) one cent ’twill
rear
A structure taller than their tallest
ear.
Washington, May 4, 1903.
