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(From The Ladye Chace)
OH, who has not heard of the Northmen of yore, | |
| How flew, like the sea-bird, their sails from the shore; | |
| How westward they stayed not till, breasting the brine, | |
| They hailed Narragansett, the land of the vine? | |
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| Then the war-songs of Rollo, his pennon and glaive, | 5 |
| Were heard as they danced by the moon-lighted wave, | |
| And their golden-haired wives bore them sons of the soil, | |
| While raged with the redskins their feud and turmoil. | |
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| And who has not seen, mid the summer’s gay crowd, | |
| That old pillared tower of their fortalice proud, | 10 |
| How it stands solid proof of the sea chieftains’ reign | |
| Ere came with Columbus those galleys of Spain? | |
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| ’T was a claim for their kindred: an earnest of sway,— | |
| By the stout-hearted Cabot made good in its day,— | |
| Of the Cross of St. George on the Chesapeake’s tide, | 15 |
| Where lovely Virginia arose like a bride. | |
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| Came the pilgrims with Winthrop; and, saint of the West, | |
| Came Robert of Jamestown, the brave and the blest; | |
| Came Smith, the bold rover, and Rolfe—with his ring, | |
| To wed sweet Matoäka, child of a king. | 20 |
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| Undaunted they came, every peril to dare, | |
| Of tribes fiercer far than the wolf in his lair; | |
| Of the wild irksome woods, where in ambush they lay; | |
| Of their terror by night and their arrow by day. | |
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| And so where our capes cleave the ice of the poles, | 25 |
| Where groves of the orange scent sea-coast and shoals, | |
| Where the froward Atlantic uplifts its last crest, | |
| Where the sun, when he sets, seeks the East from the West: | |
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| The clime that from ocean to ocean expands, | |
| The fields to the snow-drifts that stretch from the sands, | 30 |
| The wilds they have conquered of mountain and plain, | |
| Those pilgrims have made them fair Freedom’s domain. | |
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| And the bread of dependence if proudly they spurned, | |
| ’T was the soul of their fathers that kindled and burned, | |
| ’T was the blood of the Saxon within them that ran; | 35 |
| They held—to be free is the birthright of man. | |
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| So oft the old lion, majestic of mane, | |
| Sees cubs of his cave breaking loose from his reign; | |
| Unmeet to be his if they braved not his eye, | |
| He gave them the spirit his own to defy. | 40 |
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