THE QUESTION.

TELL me, Master, am I free?
From the prison land I come,

From a mocked humanity,

From the fable of a home;

Will you keep me, for my faith,

From the hound that scents my track,

From the riotous, drunken breath,

From the murder at my back?

Masters, ye are fighting long;

Well your trumpet-blast we know ; Are ye come to right a wrong?

Do we call you friend or foe?

God must come, for whom we pray, Knowing his deliverance true;

Shall our men be left to say

He must work it free of you?

Fetters of a burning chain
Held the spirit of our braves;
Waiting for the nobler strain,

Silence told him we were slaves.

THE FLAG.

THERE'S a flag hangs over my threshold, whose folds are more dear to me

Than the blood that thrills in my bosom its earnest of

liberty;

And dear are the stars it harbors in its sunny field

of blue

As the hope of a further heaven, that lights all our dim lives through.

But now should my guests be merry, the house is in holiday guise,

Looking out through its burnished windows like a

score of welcoming eyes.

Come hither, my brothers, who wander in saintliness

and in sin;

Come hither, ye pilgrims of Nature, my heart doth invite you in.

My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest

brand;

And the bread that I bid you lighten, I break with no

sparing hand:

But pause, ere ye pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be,

Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with

me.

The flag of our stately battles, not struggles of wrath

and greed,

Its stripes were a holy lesson, its spangles a deathless

creed:

'Twas red with the blood of freemen, and white with the fear of the foe;

And the stars that fight in their courses 'gainst tyrants its symbols know.

Come hither, thou son of my mother; we were reared

in the self-same arms;

Thou hast many a pleasant gesture, thy mind hath its gifts and charms ;

But

my heart is as stern to question as mine eyes are of sorrows full:

Salute the flag in its virtue, or pass on where others

rule!

Thou lord of a thousand acres, with heaps of un

counted gold,

The steeds of thy stall are haughty, thy lackeys cunning and bold:

I envy no jot of thy splendor, I rail at thy follies

none,

Salute the flag in its virtue, or leave my poor house alone!

Fair lady with silken flouncings, high waving thy stainless plume,

We welcome thee to our banquet, a flower of costliest

bloom.

Let an hundred maids live widowed to furnish thy

bridal bed;

But pause where the flag doth question, and bend thy triumphant head.