IV.

Afar is heard the breathings of the surge
That overleaps each barrier of the wrong,
And we lone watchers by the rocky verge,
May catch some murmurs of the triumph song,
Wherein our purest hopes and dreams must merge,

If we but take the cross, and deep and long
Look into nature's face, as Saints may look
Into the pages of some holy book.

V.

Can we not put a deeper, holier trust,
In the strong power of Man's divinity,
Brush from the spirit's wings that sordid rust,
That eats away its young virginity,
And makes it a mere thing of earth and dust,
A citadel where Error's troops may flee,

And launch their arrows at the good and wise,
Who challenge not the world with bigot eyes?

VI.

Man must be taught a better faith than this-
To judge of duties by the world's stiff rule,
To think all Loves and Charities amiss,

But those that fountain from a certain school;
Must learn to measure knowledge, worth and bliss,
By something higher than the small schedule
Of narrow views that cramp the soaring mind,
And stifle its best acts with thoughts unkind.

VII.

The world must yet awake to its own powers,
To grasp the embassy of brotherhood,
To feel that, far above us all, there towers

Some principle, that to the great and good
Comes with a special message, in those hours

When Slavery and Wrong have been withstood,

And Right has spoken as in days of yore
The fishers spake it on Judea's shore.

VIII.

Freemen, dark-browed and manly, must arise,
And shake the perfume from these silken times;
Roll back the clouds from labor's toiling skies,
Nor think that all of Life is in its rhymes;
Action and Will must be the potent ties

To guard mankind against the slothful crimes,
That creep into our nature's high estate,
And make us to our better hopes ingrate.

IX.

Strong-hearted Justice, with an earthquake's tread,
Must crumble to the dust the altar-stones
Of shrined Vice where, ere she rears her head,
Or gathered subjects to her upraised thrones

Of tyranny and wrong, which overspread

The earth's fair bosom, with her children's groans, And turns her nursing milk to blood and tears, A Maker's gift to feed our pains and fears.

X.

Deep must we drink of nature's holy fount,
That, desert-born, is brimming to the top,
If we would tell with more than miser's count,
Our sum of duties, as they drop and drop,
Pearl-like, into the future's vast amount,

And swelling up beyond each petty stop,
Grasp in their ocean-arms each erring one,
And bring him back to Reason's sun-lit throne.

XI.

Right haply do I know that thy big heart
Deals not out grudgingly its precious store,

But rather lets its sympathies outstart,

As waves that swell upon a golden shore, Each playing in their turn a higher part,

And lighting something that was dark before, Some moon-lit care, in which, so lone and cold, The heart lies urned, that flowers nor leaves unfold.

XII.

Thy poet-soul sees with a clearer light,
Than those whose world is bounded by to-day,
And soaring upward in a richer light,

Beyond the clogs and hindrances of clay, Can look far o'er the mists that make our night,

And mark the glimmering of that brighter ray That kindred minds with thee have long foretold Should herald in that purer Age of Gold.

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SLAVERY.

BY CARLOS D. STUART.

ENGLAND is gigantic in every thing. In wealth, in poverty, strength, weakness, beauty, filth, elevation and degradation. She has what belongs to almost every old country, whose birth was in barbarism, the extremes of good and evil, and they are both gigantic. While the proud lord absorbs to himself thousands upon thousands of God's acres, and rolls in his splendid chariot, or lounges on his soft cushions, the peasant accepts a bare life pittance for his toil from sun to sun; dwells in a hovel, and sleeps happily upon straw. Commercial princes, and cotton lords, emulate their older and more aristocratic neighbors of the soil, with a lavish of gold that dazzles even the romance of the past; but the poor wretches who oil the gudgeons, and feed the looms; who scrape ship masts-and delve into holds, at what peril and weariness no figures can estimate, they live, move, and have a being, and that is about all. Let any man belonging to neither country, England nor America, pass through the length and breadth of both, and say which has the most wretched slaves. It may be said that I judge the down-trodden of this country with prejudices natural to an American; but I am confident that my worst judgment would fall infinitely short of statistics. I feel free to say here, what I have said elsewhere, that in point of fact, there are worse bonded-slaves in England than with us. How can it be otherwise, when the lands of Great Britain are in the possession of a few thousand persons, and the larger share in the power of a few hundreds, while the money or commercial capital is centered in as many hundred thousands. These are estates belonging to lords, tenanting thousands of men, women and children, who are as verily slaves to their masters, as the negro of the pampas, or the old born-thralls of the early Saxons-whose hearths, bed and board, depend upon absolute obedience and conformity to the master's will and pleasure. They are free in name, but slaves in everything else. There is a law for them, and " intelligent English juries," but they know better than to put themselves in any predicament that requires an ap

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peal to law. They might obtain a verdict-and at the same time permission to leave their huts and cottages forever. By the very circumstances of their condition, they are the most degraded of all slaves, inasmuch as they bear the yoke, and wear the bonds, while they have the credit of being free. What are all the tenants of the Duke of Newcastle, for instance, but serfs? Can they set any price upon their labor, any bounds to their toil? Can they say I will do this or that, whether it shall please my lord or no? Can they have an opinion political or religious, more than slaves? No! My lord gives them the field to labor in, my lord defines their wages; my lord says go to or fro my lord's voice in the councils of State and Church is theirs! An English constituency upon a ducal estate, means a tenantry that does and must approve of my lord's nominees, or their living and doom is sealed. You have seen negro slaves in the South-real slaves by statute, whose masters are obliged to feed and clothe-and in every way provide for them, in health and in sickness, youth and old age--be there famine or plenty, peace or war; but you never saw such a devoted, cringing, servile, bowing, self-annihilating thing, as a real European free-born serf. A man who has no statute right to the soil, nor legal claim upon his lord. A kind of intrusive mock-humanity, that gropes and fawns for the privilege of walking by the roadside erect and is recompensed for his loss of right to speech and action, by the name of freeman. Where is the essential difference between the slave in name and fact, and the slave in fact only, who is thereby shut out from the ameliorating sympathies and prayers of mankind? I thank God, that we have none of the extremes of social condition belonging to England, more than I should to hear that our negro-slavery was to be abolished to-morrow, and those extremes succeed it. Slavery by statute is an evil to get at, it stands out bold and full, having the heart of all men set against it; but the slavery of conditions, while it is not a matter of national shame, is left uncared for, unpitied, and may deepen and thicken, as best suits the will of the strong, and the willingness of the weak. The whole English Parliament with a few exceptions, if analyzed, would show that the voice of the masses of English people, has just as little to do with government as that of so many slaves. The House of Lords is composed of men, born to their seats, peers of the realm, whether wise men or witless, and their eldest sons and brothers by their nomination or consent, go to make up the great share of the Commons; so that in fact, the people have no voice at all, except to ratify the determinations of their masters. After the landed lords fill the Commons with their eldest sons and brothers, they distribute their younger sons to less prominent relations among the offices of the Army and Navy, Church and State. The shrewd