The Sentence Of John L. Brown

Ho! thou who seekest late and long     A License from the Holy Book     For brutal lust and fiendish wrong,     Man of the Pulpit, look!     Lift up those cold and atheist eyes,     This ripe fruit of thy teaching see;     And tell us how to heaven will rise     The incense of this sacrifice     This blossom of the gallows tree!     Search out for slavery's hour of need     Some fitting text of sacred writ;     Give heaven the credit of deed     Which shames the nether pit.     Kneel, smooth blasphemer, unto Him     Whose truth is on thy lips a lie;     Ask that His bright winged cherubim     May bend around that scaffold grim     To guard and bless and sanctify.     O champion of the people's cause!     Suspend thy loud and vain rebuke     Of foreign wrong and Old World's laws,     Man of the Senate, look!     Was this the promise of the free,     The great hope of our early time,     That slavery's poison vine should be     Upborne by Freedom's prayer-nursed tree     O'erclustered with such fruits of crime?     Send out the summons East and West,     And South and North, let all be there     Where he who pitied the oppressed     Swings out in sun and air.     Let not a Democratic hand     The grisly hangman's task refuse;     There let each loyal patriot stand,     Awaiting slavery's command,     To twist the rope and draw the noose!     But vain is irony unmeet     Its cold rebuke for deeds which start     In fiery and indignant beat     The pulses of the heart.     Leave studied wit and guarded phrase     For those who think but do not feel;     Let men speak out in words which raise     Where'er they fall, an answering blaze     Like flints which strike the fire from steel.     Still let a mousing priesthood ply     Their garbled text and gloss of sin,     And make the lettered scroll deny     Its living soul within:     Still let the place-fed, titled knave     Plead robbery's right with purchased lips,     And tell us that our fathers gave     For Freedom's pedestal, a slave,     The frieze and moulding, chains and whips!     But ye who own that Higher Law     Whose tablets in the heart are set,     Speak out in words of power and awe     That God is living yet!     Breathe forth once more those tones sublime     Which thrilled the burdened prophet's lyre,     And in a dark and evil time     Smote down on Israel's fast of crime     And gift of blood, a rain of fire!     Oh, not for us the graceful lay     To whose soft measures lightly move     The footsteps of the faun and fay,     O'er-locked by mirth and love!     But such a stern and startling strain     As Britain's hunted bards flung down     From Snowden to the conquered plain,     Where harshly clanked the Saxon chain,     On trampled field and smoking town.     By Liberty's dishonored name,     By man's lost hope and failing trust,     By words and deeds which bow with shame     Our foreheads to the dust,     By the exulting strangers' sneer,     Borne to us from the Old World's thrones,     And by their victims' grief who hear,     In sunless mines and dungeons drear,     How Freedom's land her faith disowns!     Speak out in acts. The time for words     Has passed, and deeds suffice alone;     In vain against the clang of swords     The wailing pipe is blown!     Act, act in God's name, while ye may!     Smite from the church her leprous limb!     Throw open to the light of day.     The bondman's cell, and break away     The chains the state has bound on him!     Ho! every true and living soul,     To Freedom's perilled altar bear     The Freeman's and the Christian's whole     Tongue, pen, and vote, and prayer!     One last, great battle for the right     One short, sharp struggle to be free!     To do is to succeed our fight     Is waged in Heaven's approving sight;     The smile of God is Victory