Excerpt: ...limb, What is your carnival to him? Down with the law that binds him thus! Unworthy freemen, let it find No refuge from the withering curse Of God and human-kind Open the prison's living tomb, And usher from its brooding gloom The victims of your savage code To the free sun and air of God; No longer dare as crime to brand The chastening of the Almighty's hand. 1849. THE CHRISTIAN TOURISTS. The reader of the biography of William Allen, the philanthropic associate of Clarkson and Romilly, cannot fail to admire his ...
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Excerpt: ...limb, What is your carnival to him? Down with the law that binds him thus! Unworthy freemen, let it find No refuge from the withering curse Of God and human-kind Open the prison's living tomb, And usher from its brooding gloom The victims of your savage code To the free sun and air of God; No longer dare as crime to brand The chastening of the Almighty's hand. 1849. THE CHRISTIAN TOURISTS. The reader of the biography of William Allen, the philanthropic associate of Clarkson and Romilly, cannot fail to admire his simple and beautiful record of a tour through Europe, in the years 1818 and 1819, in the company of his American friend, Stephen Grellett. No aimless wanderers, by the fiend Unrest Goaded from shore to shore; No schoolmen, turning, in their classic quest, The leaves of empire o'er. Simple of faith, and bearing in their hearts The love of man and God, Isles of old song, the Moslem's ancient marts, And Scythia's steppes, they trod. Where the long shadows of the fir and pine In the night sun are cast, And the deep heart of many a Norland mine Quakes at each riving blast; Where, in barbaric grandeur, Moskwa stands, A baptized Scythian queen, With Europe's arts and Asia's jewelled hands, The North and East between! Where still, through vales of Grecian fable, stray The classic forms of yore, And beauty smiles, new risen from the spray, And Dian weeps once more; Where every tongue in Smyrna's mart resounds; And Stamboul from the sea Lifts her tall minarets over burial-grounds Black with the cypress-tree. From Malta's temples to the gates of Rome, Following the track of Paul, And where the Alps gird round the Switzer's home Their vast, eternal wall; They paused not by the ruins of old time, They scanned no pictures rare, Nor lingered where the snow-locked mountains climb The cold abyss of air! But unto prisons, where men lay in chains, To haunts where Hunger pined, To kings and courts forgetful of the pains And wants of human-kind, Scattering...
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