Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: From the eternal shadow rounding All our sun and starlight here, Voices of our lost ones sounding Bid us be of heart and cheer, Through the silence, down the spaces, falling on the inward ear. Know we not our dead are looking Downward with a sad surprise, All our strife of words rebuking With their mild and loving eyes ? Shall we grieve the holy angels ? Shall we cloud their blessed skies ? Let us draw their mantles o'er us Which have fallen in our way; Let us do the work before us, Cheerly, bravely, while we may, Ere the long night-silence cometh, and with us it is not day! THE BRANDED HAND. Captain Jonathan Walker, of Harwich, Mass., was solicited by several fugitive slaves at Pensacola, Florida, to carry them in hia vessel to the British West Indies. Although well aware of the great hazard of the enterprise he attempted to comply with the request, but was seized at sea by an American vessel, consigned to the authorities at Key West, and thence sent back to Pensa- cola, where, after a long and rigorous confinement in prison, he was tried and sentenced to be branded on his right hand with the letters "H. S." (slave-stealer) and amerced in a heavy fine. Welcome home again, brave seaman! with thy thoughtful brow and gray, And the old heroic spirit of our earlier, better day;With that front of calm endurance, on whose steady nerve in vain Pressed the iron of the prison, smote the fiery shafts of pain! Is the tyrant's brand upon thee ? Did the brutal cravens aim To make God's truth thy falsehood, His holiest work thy shame ? When, all blood-quenched, from the torture the iron was withdrawn, How laughed their evil angel the baffled fools to scorn! They change to wrong the duty which God hath written out On the great heart of hu...

שם הספר
Whittier