, 'My name is Standish.

'I come from Plymouth, deadly bored
With toasts, and songs, and speeches,
As long and flat as my old sword,
As threadbare as my breeches:
_They_ understand us Pilgrims! they,
Smooth men with rosy faces.
Strength's knots and gnarls all pared away,
And varnish in their places! 80

'We had some toughness in our grain,
The eye to rightly see us is
Not just the one that lights the brain
Of drawing-room Tyrtaeuses:
_They_ talk about their Pilgrim blood,
Their birthright high and holy!
A mountain-stream that ends in mud
Methinks is melancholy.

'He had stiff knees, the Puritan,
That were not good at bending;
The homespun dignity of man 91
He thought was worth defending;
He did not, with his pinchbeck ore,
His country's shame forgotten,
Gild Freedom's coffin o'er and o'er,
When all within was rotten.

'These loud ancestral boasts of yours,
How can they else than vex us?
Where were your dinner orators
When slavery grasped at Texas? 100
Dumb on his knees was every one
That now is bold as Caesar;
Mere pegs to hang an office on
Such stalwart men as these are.'

'Good sir,' I said, 'you seem much stirred;
The sacred compromises'--
'Now God confound the dastard word!
My gall thereat arises:
Northward it hath this sense alone
That you, your conscience blinding, 110
Shall bow your fool's nose to the stone,
When slavery feels like grinding.

''Tis shame to see such painted sticks
In Vane's and Winthrop's places,
To see your spirit of Seventy-Six
Drag humbly in the traces,
With slavery's lash upon her back,
And herds, of office-holders
To shout applause, as, with a crack, 119
It peels her patient shoulders.

'_We_ forefathers to such a rout!--
No, by my faith in God's word!'
Half rose the ghost, and half drew out
The ghost of his old broadsword,
Then thrust it slowly back again,
And said, with reverent gesture,
'No, Freedom, no! blood should not stain
The hem of thy white vesture.

'I feel the soul in me draw near
The mount of prophesying; 130
In this bleak wilderness I hear
A John the Baptist crying;
Far in the east I see upleap
The streaks of first forewarning,
And they who sowed the light shall reap
The golden sheaves of morning.

'Child of our travail and our woe,
Light in our day of sorrow,
Through my rapt spirit I foreknow
The glory of thy morrow;