Of many, may be mine; and be it Mather’s,
That slanderer of the memory of our fathers.
XXIII.
And who were they, our fathers? In their veins
Ran the best blood of England’s gentlemen;
Her bravest in the strife on battle-plains,
Her wisest in the strife of voice and pen;
Her holiest, teaching, in her holiest fanes,
The lore that led to martyrdom; and when
On this side ocean slept their wearied sails,
And their toil-bells woke up our thousand hills and dales,
XXIV.
Shamed they their fathers? Ask the village-spires
Above their Sabbath-homes of praise and prayer;
Ask of their children’s happy household-fires,
And happier harvest noons; ask summer’s air,
Made merry by young voices, when the wires
Of their school-cages are unloosed, and dare
Their slanderers’ breath to blight the memory
That o’er their graves is “growing green to see!”
XXV.
If he has “writ their annals true;” if they,
The Christian-sponsored and the Christian-nursed,
