Comrades together, equal in intelligence and adventure,
Trusting without concealment, loving without shame but with discrimination and continence towards a perfect passion.
The necessity and directness of the great elements themselves!
Swimming the rivers, braving the sun, the cold, taming the animals and the earth, conquering the air with wings, and each other with love--
God, dear God! Does she know her port, Though she goes so far about? Or blind astray, does she make her sport To brazen and chance it out? I watched when her captains passed: She were better captainless. Men in the cabin, before the mast, But some were reckless and some aghast, And some sat gorged at mess.
By her battened hatch I leaned and caught Sounds from the noisome hold,-- Cursing and sighing of souls distraught And cries too sad to be told. Then I strove to go down and see; But they said, "Thou art not of us!" I turned to those on the deck with me And cried, "Give help!" But they said, "Let be: Our ship sails faster thus."
Jill-o'er-the-ground is purple blue, Blue is the quaker-maid, The alder-clump where the brook comes through Breeds cresses in its shade. To be out of the moiling street, With its swelter and its sin! Who has given to me this sweet, And given my brother dust to eat? And when will his wage come in?
(American scholar and poet, 1819-1891, author of many impassioned poems of human freedom. An ardent anti-slavery advocate, it was said during the Civil War that his poetry was worth an army corps to the Union)
Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave? If ye do not feel the chain When it works a brother's pain, Are ye not base slaves indeed, Slaves unworthy to be freed?
Is true Freedom but to break Fetters for our own dear sake, And, with leathern hearts, forget That we owe mankind a debt? No! True Freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!
They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think: They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.