Classic Poem

And one shall say unto him, What are those wounds in thy hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends . Zachariah, xiii 6
If thou art balked, O Freedom,
The victory is not to thy manlier foes;
From the house of thy friends comes the death stab.

Vaunters of the Free,
Why do you strain your lungs off southward?
Why be going to Alabama?
Sweep first before your own door;
Stop this squalling and this scorn
Over the mote there in the distance;
Look well to your own eye, Massachusetts —
Yours, New-York and Pennsylvania;
— I would say yours too, Michigan,
But all the salve, all the surgery
Of the great wide world were powerless there.

Virginia, mother of greatness,
Blush not for being also mother of slaves.
You might have borne deeper slaves —
Doughfaces, Crawlers, Lice of Humanity —
Terrific screamers of Freedom,
Who roar and bawl, and get hot i' the face,
But, were they not incapable of august crime,
Would quench the hopes of ages for a drink —
Muck-worms, creeping flat on the ground,
A dollar dearer to them than Christ's blessing;
All loves, all hopes, less than the thought of gain;
In life walking in that as in a shroud:
Men whom the throes of heroes,
Great deeds at which the gods might stand appalled,
The shriek of a drowned world, the appeal of women,
The exulting laugh of untied empires,
Would touch them never in the heart,
But only in the pocket.

Hot-headed Carolina,
Well may you curl your lip;
With all your bondsmen, bless the destiny
Which brings you no such breed as this.

Arise, young North!
Our elder blood flows in the veins of cowards —
The gray-haired sneak, the blanched poltroon,
The feigned or real shiverer at tongues
That nursing babes need hardly cry the less for —
Are they to be our tokens always?
Fight on, band braver than warriors,
Faithful and few as Spartans;
But fear not most the angriest, loudest malice —
Fear most the still and forked fang
That starts from the grass at your feet.