This text is part of:
[323] Thanksgiving for the holy fruit! should not the laborer rest,
His earnest faith and works of love have been so richly blest?
The pride of all fair England shall her ocean islands be,
And their peasantry with joyful hearts keep ceaseless jubilee.
Rest, never! while his countrymen have trampled hearts to bleed,
The stifled murmur of their wrongs his listening ear shall heed,
Where England's far dependencies her might, not mercy, know,
To all the crushed and suffering there his pitying love shall flow.
The friend of freedom everywhere, how mourns he for our land,
The brand of whose hypocrisy burns on her guilty hand!
Her thrift a theft, the robber's greed and cunning in her eye,
Her glory shame, her flaunting flag oil all the winds a lie!
For us with steady strength of heart and zeal forever true,
The champion of the island slave the conflict doth renew,
His labor here hath been to point the Pharisaic eye
Away from empty creed and form to where the wounded lie.
Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1888-89.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.