And every gift on Freedom's shrine
Was man for beast, and blood for wine!

Our fathers to their graves have gone;
Their strife is past, their triumph won;
But sterner trials wait the race
Which rises in their honored place;
A moral warfare with the crime
And folly of an evil time.

So let it be. In God's own might
We gird us for the coming fight,
And, strong in Him whose cause is ours
In conflict with unholy powers,
We grasp the weapons He has given,--
The Light, and Truth, and Love of Heaven.
1836.




RITNER.

Written on reading the Message of Governor Ritner, of Pennsylvania,
1836. The fact redounds to the credit and serves to perpetuate the
memory of the independent farmer and high-souled statesman, that he
alone of all the Governors of the Union in 1836 met the insulting
demands and menaces of the South in a manner becoming a freeman and
hater of Slavery, in his message to the Legislature of Pennsylvania.