Page:Suggestive programs for special day exercises.djvu/40

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare.
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.
 
It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read.
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—

How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farm-yard wall.
Chasing the red-coats down the lane.
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road.
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door.
And a word that shall echo forever more;
For borne on the night-wind of the past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need.
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed.
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

 

FROM MY ARM-CHAIR.

To the children of Cambridge, who presented to me, on my seventy-second birthday, February 27, 1879, this chair made from the wood of the Village Blacksmith’s chestnut tree.—Longfellow.

Am I a king, that I should call my own
This splendid ebon throne?
Or by what reason or what—right divine,
Can I proclaim it mine?
Only, perhaps, by right divine of song
It may to me belong;
Only because the spreading chestnut tree
Of old was sung by me.

Well I remember it in all its prime.
When in the summer-time
The affluent foliage of its branches made
A cavern of cool shade.

There, by the blacksmith’s forge, beside the street,
Its blossoms white and sweet
Enticed the bees, until it seemed alive
And murmured like a hive.

And when the winds of autumn, with a shout.
Tossed its great arms about.
The shining chestnuts, bursting from the sheath,
Dropped to the ground beneath.

And now some fragments of its branches bare.
Shaped as a stately chair,
Have by my hearthstone found a home at last
And whisper of the past.

The Danish king could not in all his pride
Repel the ocean tide;
But seated in this chair, I can in rhyme,
Roll back the tide of time.

I see again, as one in vision sees.
The blossoms and the bees.
And hear the children’s voices shout and call,
And the brown chestnuts fall.

I see the smithy with its fires aglow,
I hear the bellows blow,
And the shrill hammers on the anvil beat
The iron white with heat!
 
And thus, dear children, have ye made for me
This day a jubilee.
And to my more than three-score years and ten
Brought back my youth again.

The heart hath its own memory, like the mind.
And in it are enshrined
The precious keepsakes, into which is wrought
The giver’s loving thought.

Only your love and your remembrance could
Give life to this dead wood.
And makes these branches, leafless now so long.
Blossom again in song.