To a Southern Statesman

Is this thy voice whose treble notes of fear

Wail in the wind? And dost thou shake to hear,

Actæon-like, the bay of thine own hounds,

Spurning the leash, and leaping o’er their bounds?

Sore-baffled statesman! when thy eager hand,

With game afoot, unslipped the hungry pack,

To hunt down Freedom in her chosen land,

Hadst thou no fear, that, erelong, doubling back,

These dogs of thine might snuff on Slavery’s track?

Where ’s now the boast, which even thy guarded tongue,

Cold, calm, and proud, in the teeth o’ the Senate flung,

O’er the fulfilment of thy baleful plan,

Like Satan’s triumph at the fall of man?

How stood’st thou then, thy feet on Freedom planting,

And pointing to the lurid heaven afar,

Whence all could see, through the south windows slanting,

Crimson as blood, the beams of that Lone Star!

The Fates are just; they give us but our own;

Nemesis ripens what our hands have sown.

There is an Eastern story, not unknown,

Doubtless, to thee, of one whose magic skill

Called demons up his water-jars to fill;

Deftly and silently, they did his will,

But, when the task was done, kept pouring still.

In vain with spell and charm the wizard wrought,

Faster and faster were the buckets brought,

Higher and higher rose the flood around,

Till the fiends clapped their hands above their master drowned!

So, Carolinian, it may prove with thee,

For God still overrules man’s schemes, and takes

Craftiness in its self-set snare, and makes

The wrath of man to praise Him. It may be,

That the roused spirits of Democracy

May leave to freer States the same wide door

Through which thy slave-cursed Texas entered in,

From out the blood and fire, the wrong and sin,

Of the stormed city and the ghastly plain,