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e of pain, there was one beside her with tenderest hands, most careful eyes, most yearning and revering heart,--one into whose sacred grief our intrusion is denied, but the remembrance of whose long and deep devotion shall endure while there are any to tell how Severn watched the Roman death-bed of Keats!
It is impossible to estimate our loss, because it draws upon infinitude; there was so much growth yet possible to this soul; to all that she was not she might yet have enlarged; and while at first her audience had limits, she would in a calm and prosperous future have become that which she herself described in saying that a really vast genius who is as vast an artist will affect all classes, "touch even the uninitiated with trembling and delight, and penetrate even the ignorant with strong, if transient spell, as the galvanic energy binds each and all who embrace in the chain-circle of grasping hands, in the shock of perfect sympathy." Nevertheless, she has served Art incalculably,--Art, which is the interpretation of God in Nature. And if, as she believed, in spiritual things Beauty is the gage of immortality, the pledge may yet be redeemed on earth, ever forbidding her memory to die.
ASTRAEA AT THE CAPITOL.
ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 1862.
When first I saw our banner wave Above the nation's council-hall, I heard beneath its marble wall The clanking fetters of the slave!
In the foul market-place I stood, And saw the Christian mother sold, And childhood with its locks of gold, Blue-eyed and fair with Saxon blood.
I shut my eyes, I held my breath, And, smothering down the wrath and shame That set my Northern blood aflame, Stood silent--where to speak was death.
Beside me gloomed the prison-cell Where wasted one in slow decline For uttering simple words of mine, And loving freedom all too well.
The flag that floated from the dome Flapped menace in the morning air; I stood, a perilled stranger, where The human broker made h