You think, no doubt, _you_’ve tried John Brown, but he’s laid there trying _you_, And the world has been his jury, and its judgment’s swift and true: Over the globe the tale has rung, back to your hearts the verdict’s flung, That you’re found, as you’ve been always found, a brutal, cowardly crew! At the wave of his hand to a dozen men, two thousand slunk like hounds; He kennelled you up, and kept you too, till twice you saw through the azure blue, The day-star circle round. No longer the taunt, our history’s new, “our hero is yet to come”-- We’ve suddenly leaped a thousand years beyond the rolling sun! And, sheeted round with a martyr’s glory, again on earth’s renewed the story Of bravery, truth, and righteousness, a battle lost and won; A life laid down for the poor and weak, the immortal crown put on; The spark of Luther’s touched to the pile--swords gleam--black smoke obscures the sun-- And the slave and his master are gone! Ages hence, when all is over that shocks the sense of the world to-day, Pilgrims will mount the western wave, seeking the new Thermopylæ; Then, for that brave old man with many sons, mangled and murdered, one by one, Whose ghosts rise up from Harper’s gorge, Missouri’s plains, and far away Where Kansas’ grains wave tinged with their blood, will the column rise! The Poet’s song and History’s page will the deeds prolong of John of Osawatomie, The Martyr to Truth and Right! [From the New York Independent.] THE VIRGINIA SCAFFOLD. Rear on high the scaffold altar! all the world will turn to see How a man has dared to suffer that his brothers may be free! Hear it on some hill-side looking North and South and East and West, Where the wind from every quarter fresh may blow upon his breast, And the sun look down unshaded from the chill December sky, Glad to shine upon the hero who for Freedom dared to die! All the world will turn to see him;--from the pines of wave-washed Maine To the golden rivers rolling over California’s plain, And from clear Superior’s waters, where the wild swan loves to sail, To the Gulf-lands, summer-bosomed, fanned by ocean’s softest gale,-- Every heart will beat the faster in its sorrow or its scorn, For the man nor courts nor prisons can annoy another morn! And from distant climes and nations men shall westward gaze, and say, “He who perilled all for Freedom on the scaffold dies to-day.”