Gentiles and lesser breeds without the law-peoples without Christian civilization.

Reeking tube-cannon.

Iron shard-broken pieces of bomb shells.

Valiant dust that builds on dust-courageous men who rely wholly upon their own powers and forget God.

And so we see that the poem is a protest against the spirit of the English nation as shown in the Queen's jubilee, and a prayer to the Judge of Nations for mercy.

THE LADDER OF ST. AUGUSTINE

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, was the most eminent of the Latin Fathers of the Church. He was born November 13, 354, in Numidia (the eastern half of modern Algeria), and died 430. He lived at Carthage, Rome, Milan, and Hippo. During his youth and early manhood he was guilty of many excesses, vices, and follies. Years later, in one of his sermons he used the expression, "De vitiis nostris scalam nobis facimus, si vitia ipsa calcamus" (of our vices we make for ourselves a ladder, if we trample them under foot). None knew better than St. Augustine the truth of this from his own experiences. Longfellow takes the thought and elaborates it into a familiar poem. He gives a catalogue of vices, each one of which may be made to serve as a round in the ladder; but to become such it must be put under foot. Pupils should make a list of these "rounds of the ladder" and discuss them in class.

Any good picture of the Egyptian pyramids will show how true the description is in stanza eight.

THE LADDER OF ST. AUGUSTINE

1

Saint Augustine! well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread

Beneath our feet each deed of shame!

2

All common things, each day's events
That with the hour begin and end;
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.

3

The low desire, the base design,
That makes another's virtues less;

The revel of the giddy wine,

And all occasions of excess;

4

The longing for ignoble things,

The strife for triumph more than truth,
The hardening of the heart, that brings
Irreverence for the dreams of youth;

5

All thoughts of ill-all evil deeds

That have their root in thoughts of ill; Whatever hinders or impedes

The action of the nobler will;

6

All these must first be trampled down
Beneath our feet, if we would gain
In the bright field of fair renown
The right of eminent domain !

7

We have not wings, we cannot soar,
But we have feet to scale and climb
By slow degrees-by more and more-
The cloudy summits of our time.

8

The mighty pyramids of stone

That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,

When nearer seen and better known,
Are but gigantic flights of stairs.

9

The distant mountains that uprear Their frowning foreheads to the skies, Are crossed by pathways that appear

As we to higher levels rise.

10

The heights by great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight;
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

11

Standing on what too long we bore
With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
We may discern, unseen before,
A path to higher destinies.

12

Nor deem the irrevocable past
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,

If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The right of eminent domain (stanza six)—the right of supreme control for the good of ourselves and others. Technically it means the right of a government or a state over all the property within the state to appropriate any part thereof to a necessary public use, reasonable compensation being made.

The thought which Longfellow uses in this poem is similar to that used by Tennyson in the first stanza of In Memoriam:

I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

And J. G. Holland has two verses in a similar vein in his poem Gradatim:

Heaven is not reached at a single bound;

But we build the ladder by which we rise
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies,
And we mount to the summit round by round.
We rise by things that are under our feet;
By what we have mastered of good and gain ;
By the pride deposed and the passion slain,
And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet.

ICHABOD

The Biblical name Ichabod ("Ichabod, the glory is departed") is here applied by Whittier to Daniel Webster. Whittier was the foremost of the anti-slavery poets, and Webster was regarded as the great defender of the Union against the doctrine of states' rights. But when Webster made his speech in 1850 in defense of a fugitive slave law, his friends at the North regarded it as a bid for southern support in his candidacy for the presidential nomination, and as little short of treason to the Union cause. Immediately after this speech of Webster's, Whittier wrote the poem Ichabod, expressing his own feelings and the feelings of the North towards Webster's changed attitude. Thirty years later Whittier wrote The Lost Occasion, in which he made amends for whatever injustice Ichabod might have done to the character of the great orator and statesman.

Ichabod is one of the strongest of Whittier's poems, and the finest lines in it are, perhaps,

his dim, dishonored brow,