O'ER town and cottage, vale
and height,
Down came the Winter, fierce and white,
And shuddering wildly, as distraught
At horrors his own
hand had wrought.
His child, the young Year, newly
born,
Cheerless, cowering, and affrighted,
Wailed with
a shivering voice forlorn,
As on a frozen heath
benighted.
In vain the hearths were set aglow,
In vain
the evening lamps were lighted,
To cheer the dreary realm
of snow:
Old Winter's brow would not be smoothed,
Nor
the young Year's wailing soothed.
How sad the wretch
at morn or eve
Compelled his starving home to leave,
Who, plunged breast-deep from drift to drift,
Toils
slowly on from rift to rift,
Still hearing in his aching
ear
The cry his fancy whispers near,
Of little ones
who weep for bread
Within an ill-provided shed!
But wilder, fiercer, sadder still,
Freezing the tear it
caused to start,
Was the inevitable chill
Which
pierced a nation's agued heart,�
A nation with its naked
breast
Against the frozen barriers prest,
Heaving its
tedious way and slow
Through shifting gulfs and drifts of
woe,
Where every blast that whistled by
Was bitter
with its children's cry.
Such was the winter's awful
sight
For many a dreary day and night,
What time our
country's hope forlorn,
Of every needed comfort shorn,
Lay housed within a hurried tent,
Where every keen blast
found a rent,
And oft the snow was seen to sift
Along
the floor its piling drift,
Or, mocking the scant
blankets' fold,
Across the night-couch frequent rolled;
Where every path by a soldier beat,
Or every track where
a sentinel stood,
Still held the print of naked feet,
And oft the crimson stains of blood;
Where Famine held
her spectral court,
And joined by all her fierce allies:
She ever loved a camp or fort
Beleaguered by the wintry
skies,�
But chiefly when Disease is by,
To sink the
frame and dim the eye,
Until, with seeking forehead bent,
In martial garments cold and damp,
Pale Death patrols
from tent to tent,
To count the charnels of the camp.
Such was the winter that prevailed
Within the
crowded, frozen gorge;
Such were the horrors that
assailed
The patriot band at Valley Forge.
It was
a midnight storm of woes
To clear the sky for Freedom's
morn;
And such must ever be the throes
The hour when
Liberty is born.
The chieftain, by his evening lamp,
Whose flame scarce cheered the hazy damp,
Sat toiling
o'er some giant plan,
With maps and charts before him
spread,
Beholding in his warrior scan
The paths which
through the future led. |
