"Men of the North! The South you charge with wrong Is weak and poor, while you are rich and strong. If questions,--idle and absurd as those The old-time monks and Paduan doctors chose,-- Mere ghosts of questions, tariffs, and dead banks, And scarecrow pontiffs, never broke your ranks, Your thews united could, at once, roll back The jostled nation to its primal track. Nay, were you simply steadfast, manly, just, True to the faith your fathers left in trust, If stainless honor outweighed in your scale A codfish quintal or a factory bale, Full many a noble heart, (and such remain In all the South, like Lot in Siddim's plain, Who watch and wait, and from the wrong's control Keep white and pure their chastity of soul,) Now sick to loathing of your weak complaints, Your tricks as sinners, and your prayers as saints, Would half-way meet the frankness of your tone, And feel their pulses beating with your own. "The North! the South! no geographic line Can fix the boundary or the point define, Since each with each so closely interblends, Where Slavery rises, and where Freedom ends. Beneath your rocks the roots, far-reaching, hide Of the fell Upas on the Southern side; The tree whose branches in your northwinds wave Dropped its young blossoms on Mount Vernon's grave; The nursling growth of Monticello's crest Is now the glory of the free Northwest; To the wise maxims of her olden school Virginia listened from thy lips, Rantoul; Seward's words of power, and Sumner's fresh renown, Flow from the pen that Jefferson laid down! And when, at length, her years of madness o'er, Like the crowned grazer on Euphrates' shore, From her long lapse to savagery, her mouth Bitter with baneful herbage, turns the South, Resumes her old attire, and seeks to smooth Her unkempt tresses at the glass of truth, Her early faith shall find a tongue again, New Wythes and Pinckneys swell that old refrain, Her sons with yours renew the ancient pact, The myth of Union prove at last a fact! Then, if one murmur mars the wide content, Some Northern lip will drawl the last dissent, Some Union-saving patriot of your own Lament to find his occupation gone. "Grant that the North 's insulted, scorned, betrayed, O'erreached in bargains with her neighbor made, When selfish thrift and party held the scales For peddling dicker, not for honest sales,-- Whom shall we strike? Who most deserves our blame? The braggart Southron, open in his aim, And bold as wicked, crashing straight through all That bars his purpose, like a cannon-ball? Or the mean traitor, breathing northern air, With nasal speech and puritanic hair, Whose cant the loss of principle survives, As the mud-turtle e'en its head outlives; Who, caught, chin-buried in some foul offence, Puts on a look of injured innocence, And consecrates his baseness to the cause Of constitution, union, and the laws?