OLD BROWN.

Old Lion! tangled in the net,

Baffled and spent, and wounded sore,
Bound, thou who ne'er knew bonds before,

A captive, but a lion yet.

Death kills not. In a later time,

(O, slow, but all-accomplishing!) Thy shouted name abroad shall ring, Wherever right makes war sublime.

When in the perfect scheme of God,
It shall not be a crime for deeds
To quicken liberating creeds,

And men shall rise where slaves have trod;

Then he, the fearless future Man,

Shall wash the blot and stain away,

We fix upon thy name today

Thou hero of the noblest plan.

O, patience, felon of the hour!

Over thy ghastly gallows-tree
Shall climb the vine of Liberty,

With ripened fruit and fragrant flower.

- Wm. D. Howells.

December, 1859.

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Taking the oath of allegiance to the anti-slavery cause, 1857. From a daguerreotype in the Mr. and Mrs. T. B. Alexander collection in the Museum of the Ohio State Archæological and Historical Society. Later in life Brown wore a full beard.

The Great Republic bred her free-born sons
To smother conscience in the coward's hush,
And had to have a freedom-champion's

Blood sprinkled in her face to make her blush.

One will become a passion to avenge

Her shame a fury consecrate and weird, As if the old religion of Stonehenge

Amid our weakling worships reappeared.

It was a drawn sword of Jehovah's wrath,
Two-edged and flaming, waved back to a host
Of mighty shadows gathering on its path,

Soon to emerge as soldiers, when the ghost

Of John Brown should the lines of battle form.

When John Brown crossed the Nation's Rubicon, Him freedom followed in the battle-storm,

And John Brown's soul in song went marching on.

Though John Brown's body lay beneath the sod,

His soul released the winds and loosed the flood; The Nation wrought his will as hest of God,

And her blood-guiltiness atoned with blood.

The world may censure and the world regret;
The present wrath becomes the future ruth;
For stern old History does not forget

The man who flings his life away for truth.

In the far time to come, when it shall irk
The schoolboy to recite our Presidents
Dull line of memorabilia, John Brown's work
Shall thrill him through from all the elements.
-Coates Kinney.

July, 1897.

JOHN BROWN.

RY C. B. GALBREATH

INTRODUCTION.

"John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave
But his soul goes marching on."

So sang the Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment as it marched south to put down the rebellion and so have sung other regiments and men who never belonged to any military organization in almost every part of the North and West since the outbreak of the Civil War.

It is remarkable how old John Brown holds his place in the history and literature of his country. His name and deeds have been the theme of divided opinion and heated disputation, of eloquence and song, of eulogy and detraction, of generous praise and scathing criticism. If his spirit could speak today he might truthfully say, "I came not to send peace but a sword." Those who comment upon the part that he acted in the "storm of the years that are fading" find themselves arrayed one against another when they come to pass judgment upon his deeds, and not infrequently the critic exemplifies "a house divided against itself" and expresses in the same estimate opinions condemnatory and laudatory.

In undiminished measure his fame endures, however. Even at this late day interest in "Old John Brown of Osawatomie" persists, and since the beginning of the new century at least four pretentious volumes have