BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Drinking Song
To the Abbé de la Roche, at Auteuil
Singer
Fair Venus calls, her voice obey,
In beauty’s arms spend night and day.
The joys of love, all joys excel,
And loving’ s certainly doing well.
Chorus
Oh! no!
Not so!
For honest souls know,
Friends and a bottle still bear the bell.
Singer
Then let us get money, like bees lay up honey;
We’ll build us new hives, and store each cell.
The sight of our treasure shall yield us great pleasure;
We’ll count it, and chink it, and jingle it well.
Chorus
Oh! no!
Not so!
For honest souls know,
Friends and a bottle still bear the bell.
Singer
If this does not fit ye, let’s govern the city,
In power is pleasure no tongue can tell;
By crowds tho’ you’re teas’d your pride shall be pleas’d
And this can make Lucifer happy in hell!
Chorus
Oh! No!
Not so!
For honest souls know,
Friends and a bottle still bear the bell.
Singer
Then toss of your glasses, and scorn the dull asses,
Who, missing the kernel still gnaw the shell;
What’s love, rule, or riches? Wise Solomon teaches,
They’re vanity, vanity, vanity still.
Chorus
That’s true;
He knew;
He’d tried them all through;
Friends and a bottle still bore the bell.
(1779)
Philip Freneau
Wild Honeysuckle
Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouch’d thy honey’d blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet:
No roving foot shall crush thee here,
No busy hand provoke a tear.
By Nature’s self in white array’d,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
Thus quietly thy summer goes,
Thy days declining to repose.
Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see thy future doom;
They died—nor were those flowers more gay,
(The flowers that did in Eden bloom)
Unpitying frosts and Autumn’s power
Shall leave no vestige of this flower.
From morning suns and evening dews
At first thy little being came:
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
The space between is but an hour,
The mere idea of a flower.
(1786)
Carrie Williams Clifford
Character or Color—Which?
What is blood, or what is birth?
What is black or white?
Or small or great, or rich or poor?
Just so the man’s all right?
O, vain and haughty white man, why
Of ancestry prate so?
Can you in tracing your descent.
Farther than Adam go?
Why boast of culture ? Well you know.
Ere to your present state
Of progress and renown you’d come,
(With statesmen wise and great — )
The blacks had splendidly achieved
Long centuries before;
Their monuments, unrivaled still,
Adorn old Afric’s shore.
No adventitious circumstance
Can fix a people’s station.
Integrity’s the thing that counts
In any man or nation.
Then modestly let’s run our course —
All hist’ry tells the story:
No race but has its page of shame.
None lacks its page of glory.
So what is blood or what is birth?
What is black or white?
Or great or small, or rich or poor.
Just so the man’s all right?
(1911)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Bury Me in a Free Land
Make me a grave where’er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave;
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.
I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother’s shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.
I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.
I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.
If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.
I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might
Can rob no man of his dearest right;
My rest shall be calm in any grave
Where none can call his brother a slave.
I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.
(1854)
John Greenleaf Whittier
Among The Hills: Prelude
Church-goers, fearful of the unseen Powers,
But grumbling over pulpit-tax and pew-rent,
Saving, as shrewd economists, their souls
And winter pork with the least possible outlay
Of salt and sanctity; in daily life
Showing as little actual comprehension
Of Christian charity and love and duty,
As if the Sermon on the Mount had been
Outdated like a last year’s almanac
Rich in broad woodlands and in half-tilled fields,
And yet so pinched and bare and comfortless,
The veriest straggler limping on his rounds,
The sun and air his sole inheritance,
Laughed at a poverty that paid its taxes,
And hugged his rags in self-complacency!
Not such should be the homesteads of a land
Where whoso wisely wills and acts may dwell
As king and lawgiver, in broad-acred state,
With beauty, art, taste, culture, books, to make
His hour of leisure richer than a life
Of fourscore to the barons of old time,
Our yeoman should be equal to his home
Set in the fair, green valleys, purple walled,
A man to match his mountains, not to creep
Dwarfed and abased below them.
(1807)
Herman Melville
Shiloh: A Requiem
Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh—
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh—
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there—
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.
(1862)
Phoebe Cary
Advice Gratis To Certain Women, by A Woman
O, my strong-minded sisters, aspiring to vote,
And to row with your brothers, all in the same boat,
When you come out to speak to the public your mind,
Leave your tricks, and your airs, and your graces behind!
For instance, when you by the world would be seen
As reporter, or editor (first-class, I mean),
I think — just to come to the point in one line —
What you write will be finer, if ’tis not too fine.
Pray, don’t let the thread of your subject be strung
With “golden,” and “shimmer,” “sweet,” “filter,” and “flung;”
Nor compel, by your style, all your readers to guess
You’ve been looking up words Webster marks obs.
And another thing: whatever else you may say,
Do keep personalities out of the way;
Don’t try every sentence to make people see
What a dear, charming creature the writer must be!
Leave out affectations and pretty appeals;
Don’t “drag yourself in by the neck and the heels,”
Your dear little boots, and your gloves; and take heed,
Nor pull your curls over men’s eyes while they read.
Don’t mistake me; I mean that the public’s not home,
You must do as the Romans do, when you’re in Rome;
I would have you be womanly, while you are wise;
‘Tis the weak and the womanish tricks I despise.
On the other hand: don’t write and dress in such styles
As astonish the natives, and frighten the isles;
Do look, on the platform, so folks in the show
Needn’t ask, “Which are lions, and which tigers?” you know!
‘Tis a good thing to write, and to rule in the state,
But to be a true, womanly woman is great:
And if ever you come to be that, ’twill be when
You can cease to be babies, nor try to be men!
(1854)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“He walked the streets of great New York”
He walked the streets of great New York
Full of men, the men were full of blood
Signs of power, signs of worth,
Yet all seemed trivial
As the ceaseless cry
Of the newsboys in the street
Now men do not listen after
The voice in the breast
Which makes the thunder mean
But the Great God hath departed
And they listen after Scott & Byron
I met no gods – I harboured none,
As I walked by noon & night alone
The crowded ways
And yet I found in the heart of the town
A few children of God nestling in his bosom
Not detached as all the crowd appeared
each one a sutlers boat
Cruising for private gain
But these seemed undetached united
Lovers of Love, of Truth,
And as among indians they say
The One the One is known
so under the eaves of Wall Street
Brokers had met the Eternal
In the city of surfaces
Where I a swain became a surface
I found & worshipped him.
Always thus neighbored well
The two contemporaries dwell
The World which by the world is known
And Wisdom seeking still its own
I walked with men
Who seemed as if they were chairs or stools
Tables or shopwindows or champagne baskets
For these they loved & were if truly seen
I walked with others of their wisdom gave me proof
Who brought the starry heaven
As near as the house roof
(1840–1849)
Ambrose Bierce
Egoist
Megaceph, chosen to serve the State
In the halls of legislative debate,
One day with his credentials came
To the capitol’s door and announced his name.
The doorkeeper looked, with a comical twist
Of the face, at the eminent egotist,
And said: “Go away, for we settle here
All manner of questions, knotty and queer,
And we cannot have, when the speaker demands
To know how every member stands,
A man who to all things under the sky
Assents by eternally voting ‘I.'”
(1911)
Emma Lazarus
1492
Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford,
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.
Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here!
There falls each ancient barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”
(1883)
Walt Whitman
The Prairie Grass Dividing
The prairie-grass dividing—its special odor breathing,
I demand of it the spiritual corresponding,
Demand the most copious and close companionship of men,
Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings,
Those of the open atmosphere, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious,
Those that go their own gait, erect, stepping with freedom and
command—leading, not following,
Those with a never-quell’d audacity—those with sweet and lusty
flesh, clear of taint,
Those that look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and Governors,
as to say, Who are you?
Those of earth-born passion, simple, never-constrain’d, never
obedient,
Those of inland America.
(1860)
Stephen Crane
Friend, your white beard sweeps the ground.
Friend, your white beard sweeps the ground.
Why do you stand, expectant?
Do you hope to see it
In one of your withered days?
DO you hope to see
The triumphal march of justice?
Do not wait, friend.
Take your white beard
And your old eyes
To more tender lands.
When the prophet, a complacent fat man
When the prophet, a complacent fat man,
Arrived at the mountain-top
He cried: “woe to my knowledge!
“I intended to see good white lands
“And bad black lands —
“But the scene is grey.”
(1899)
