XX.
And wove his forest dreams into quaint prose,
Our sires his heroes, where, in holy strife,
They treacherously war with friends and foes;
Where meek religion wears the assassin’s knife,
And “bids the desert blossom like the rose,”
By sprinkling earth with blood of Indian life,
And rears her altars o’er the indignant bones
Of murdered maidens, wives, and little ones.
XXI.
Herod of Galilee’s babe-butchering deed
Lives not on history’s blushing page alone;
Our skies, it seems, have seen like victims bleed,
And our own Ramahs echoed groan for groan:
The fiends of France, whose cruelties decreed
Those dextrous drownings in the Loire and Rhone,
Were at their worst, but copyists second-hand
Of our shrined, sainted sires, the Plymouth pilgrim-band,
XXII.
Or else fibs Mather. Kindred wolves have bayed
Truth’s moon in chorus, but believe them not!
Beneath the dark trees that the Lethe shade,
Be he, his folios, followers, facts, forgot;
And let his perishing monument be made
Of his own unsold volumes: ’tis the lot
