Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Occasional Poems

One of the Signers

Written for the unveiling of the statue of Josiah Bartlett at Amesbury, Mass., July 4, 1888. Governor Bartlett, who was a native of the town, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Amesbury or Ambresbury, so called from the “anointed stones” of the great Druidical temple near it, was the seat of one of the earliest religious houses in Britain. The tradition that the guilty wife of King Arthur fled thither for protection forms one of the finest passages in Tennyson’s Idyls of the King.

O STORIED vale of Merrimac

Rejoice through all thy shade and shine,

And from his century’s sleep call back

A brave and honored son of thine.

Unveil his effigy between

The living and the dead to-day;

The fathers of the Old Thirteen

Shall witness bear as spirits may.

Unseen, unheard, his gray compeers

The shades of Lee and Jefferson,

Wise Franklin reverend with his years

And Carroll, lord of Carrollton!

Be thine henceforth a pride of place

Beyond thy namesake’s over-sea,

Where scarce a stone is left to trace

The Holy House of Amesbury.

A prouder memory lingers round

The birthplace of thy true man here

Than that which haunts the refuge found

By Arthur’s mythic Guinevere.

The plain deal table where he sat

And signed a nation’s title-deed

Is dearer now to fame than that

Which bore the scroll of Runnymede.

Long as, on Freedom’s natal morn,

Shall ring the Independence bells,

Give to thy dwellers yet unborn

The lesson which his image tells.

For in that hour of Destiny,

Which tried the men of bravest stock,

He knew the end alone must be

A free land or a traitor’s block.

Among those picked and chosen men

Than his, who here first drew his breath,

No firmer fingers held the pen

Which wrote for liberty or death.

Not for their hearths and homes alone,

But for the world their work was done;

On all the winds their thought has flown

Through all the circuit of the sun.

We trace its flight by broken chains,

By songs of grateful Labor still;

To-day, in all her holy fanes,

It rings the bells of freed Brazil.

O hills that watched his boyhood’s home,

O earth and air that nursed him, give,

In this memorial semblance, room

To him who shall its bronze outlive!

And thou, O Land he loved, rejoice

That in the countless years to come,

Whenever Freedom needs a voice,

These sculptured lips shall not be dumb!