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(From The Wagoner of the Alleghanies)
O’ER town and cottage, vale and height, | |
| Down came the Winter, fierce and white, | |
| And shuddering wildly, as distraught | |
| At horrors his own hand had wrought. | |
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| His child, the young Year, newly born, | 5 |
| Cheerless, cowering, and affrighted, | |
| Wailed with a shivering voice forlorn, | |
| As on a frozen heath benighted. | |
| In vain the hearths were set aglow, | |
| In vain the evening lamps were lighted, | 10 |
| To cheer the dreary realm of snow: | |
| Old Winter’s brow would not be smoothed, | |
| Nor the young Year’s wailing soothed. | |
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| How sad the wretch at morn or eve | |
| Compelled his starving home to leave, | 15 |
| Who, plunged breast-deep from drift to drift, | |
| Toils slowly on from rift to rift, | |
| Still hearing in his aching ear | |
| The cry his fancy whispers near, | |
| Of little ones who weep for bread | 20 |
| Within an ill-provided shed! | |
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| But wilder, fiercer, sadder still, | |
| Freezing the tear it caused to start, | |
| Was the inevitable chill | |
| Which pierced a nation’s agued heart,— | 25 |
| A nation with its naked breast | |
| Against the frozen barriers prest, | |
| Heaving its tedious way and slow | |
| Through shifting gulfs and drifts of woe, | |
| Where every blast that whistled by | 30 |
| Was bitter with its children’s cry. | |
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| Such was the winter’s awful sight | |
| For many a dreary day and night, | |
| What time our country’s hope forlorn, | |
| Of every needed comfort shorn, | 35 |
| Lay housed within a hurried tent, | |
| Where every keen blast found a rent, | |
| And oft the snow was seen to sift | |
| Along the floor its piling drift, | |
| Or, mocking the scant blankets’ fold, | 40 |
| Across the night-couch frequent rolled; | |
| Where every path by a soldier beat, | |
| Or every track where a sentinel stood, | |
| Still held the print of naked feet, | |
| And oft the crimson stains of blood; | 45 |
| Where Famine held her spectral court, | |
| And joined by all her fierce allies: | |
| She ever loved a camp or fort | |
| Beleaguered by the wintry skies,— | |
| But chiefly when Disease is by, | 50 |
| To sink the frame and dim the eye, | |
| Until, with seeking forehead bent, | |
| In martial garments cold and damp, | |
| Pale Death patrols from tent to tent, | |
| To count the charnels of the camp. | 55 |
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| Such was the winter that prevailed | |
| Within the crowded, frozen gorge; | |
| Such were the horrors that assailed | |
| The patriot band at Valley Forge. | |
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| It was a midnight storm of woes | 60 |
| To clear the sky for Freedom’s morn; | |
| And such must ever be the throes | |
| The hour when Liberty is born. | |
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| The chieftain, by his evening lamp, | |
| Whose flame scarce cheered the hazy damp, | 65 |
| Sat toiling o’er some giant plan, | |
| With maps and charts before him spread, | |
| Beholding in his warrior scan | |
| The paths which through the future led. * * * * * | |
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