THE NATION AND THE SHIP.*

BY OSCAR W. FIRKINS.

The frigate Minnesota, built in 1854, a participant during the Civil War in successful attacks on Hatteras Inlet and Fort Fisher, and a spectator of the famous conflict between the Monitor and the Merrimac, was sold July 17, 1901, to a mercantile company. The gift of the steering-wheel of the frigate to the Minnesota Historical Society was the occasion of the following lines.

Gift of the forest to the sea,
Gift of a race to liberty,
Whose sides in double onset bore
The flux of ocean and of war,
We, far from war, remote from sea,
Yet linked in sympathy with thee
By tie of name and bond of race,
The records of thy deeds retrace.

When danger wrought its sombre spell
And freedom dropped as Union fell,
The cry rang out for ships and crews
And men and forests gave their thews.
Sudden and swift the change that passed;
It felled the bole and reared the mast:
What steadfast in the steadfast clay
Its listless years had drowsed away,
Adrift, on sterner mission sent,
Roamed on the roaming element.

So nations that in peace and weal
Have watched their patient decades steal,
When the sharp stroke their sinew tries,

*Read at the monthly meeting of the Executive Council, September 12, 1904; published in the Minnesota Magazine (University of Minnesota), vol. xi, pp. 40-43, November, 1904.

Reel from their hoar securities,

And toss upon the currents rude

Of terror and vicissitude.

The riven earth its metal lent
To forge her deadly armament;
The hearth unto the deck resigned
The elastic form, the fearless mind:
She bore in union sad and great
Her human and her iron freight.

The sea beneath her chafed and sprayed;
The guns within her shook and brayed.
As to and fro the pulses ran,

Could beam of oak and breast of man

The blent and meeting tremors know
From guns above and waves below.
It suited Freedom's legate well
In Freedom's paradise to dwell,
Where masts ascending sought on high
Communion with the vergeless sky,
Where sail and hull no touch could find,
No presence hostile to the free,

One, playmate of the unpinioned wind,
One, fellow to the yokeless sea.

Through shine of hope and dusk of fear
She ran her long and high career,
And reached in venerated age
The sad and final anchorage.

The grim years took her in their tow
(What victim will the years forego?)
And she whom urgings of the gale
And fury of the missile hail,
Whom fiercer blast and deadlier rain
By brother sped for brother's bane
Had harmless swept, was borne away,
The prize of time and of decay.

Her masters took the captor's part;
They bore her to the grasping mart;

They bared the hollowed palm to hold
The sordid tale of bootless gold.

The Union saw those fibres rent

Whose strength had been its own cement.
Heard we no wailful message pass
From Fisher on to Hatteras,
No signal from the livid track
Trenched by the baffled Merrimac?
No voice was heard or none obeyed;
Her years, her honors, vainly prayed;
And friendship shrunk not to bestow
Less than the pity of a foe.

Ships own like men but transient lives,
No oak subsists, no flesh survives;
From other masts must shine afar
The flame stripe and the cusped star;
To younger faith, to fresher zeal
Descends the rescued commonweal.
O may that ardor still incline
To purposes as pure as thine!
If darker errand e'er should guide
Our cruisers o'er the wrathful tide,
And drops of fouler purple stain
The girdled and the humbled main;
Should peace revoke what warfare gave,
The sons of sires who loosed the slave
Enchain the freemen,-if at last
(O base extinction of the past)
Linked in imperishable tie

Our honor in their freedom die:
Should we not feel thy uttered name
Burn on our recreant lips like flame,
And pause to list the nation's knell
In each reproachful syllable?
God grant high names may never lack
Voices as high to fling them back,
Nor houseless memories seek in vain
Hearts meet their glories to contain!

Keep we our spirits fit to be
The chapels of thy memory.

A truce to fear. Beside us lies

A sign of blither destinies.

Some ruth the trader's heart could feel:
He sold the hulk, but spared the wheel.
We take the relic which he gave,

Symbol of all we ask and crave,
The past's release, the future's debt,
An omen, gage, and amulet.

Sink, if time bid, the stalwart frame;
Fall, if fate will, the honored name;
So fate and time forbear to whelm

The faith that shaped and swayed the helm,
Stand but the guiding purpose firm,
The rest may glut the wave or worm.
Through breed on breed of lusty sons
The strong incentive downward runs;
Deed is progenitor of deed;

The laurel hides the laurel's seed;
The steersman's trust in peace or war,
The old ideal rears its star:
The star above, the helm below,

The pilot steadfast 'twixt the twain,
The turning wheel, the changeless glow-
Such may our people's course remain.