WHAT murmurs are these that so wofully rise
Into heart-storms of agony borne from afar?
A tempest of passion, a tumult of sighs?
There is dread on the earth, and stern grief in the skies,
While the nations, appalled, watch the realm of the Czar!
Can humanity's sun have gone down in an hour,
Or a fiend have struck mercy's soft key-note ajar,
That upwhirled on the fierce winds of madness and power,
This cloud--with its hail of harsh hatreds--should lower
O'er those who still call on their "father," the Czar?
Call hell have burst upward, and spawned from its womb
The worst of all demons that menace and mar?
O God! See an empire reeking in gloom--
Hark! the death-shock, the shriek, the wild volleys of doom--
Ay! the riot of hell shakes the land of the Czar!
The fields are flame-girdled, the rivers roll red
Through the sulphurous fumes and swift ravage of war,
A war on the helpless, unhelmeted head,
Which tortures the living and spares not the dead;
Is he sleeping, or dumb, their "good father" the Czar?
Ah, no!--through the corridors stately and vast
Of his palace that gleams like a pale polar star,
On a gale from the south these black tidings have passed:
He hears! and the lightnings of justice at last
Quiver hissing and hot in the hand of the Czar!
The world holds its breathing to mark them in flame
On their limitless course that no bulwark call bar;
But instead, through his wily state parasite came
A rescript so false, its unspeakable shame
Should haunt to his death the dark dreams of the Czar!
No word for the victims, all butchered and bare,
By the hearth-stone defiled, and the blood-tainted lar;
For the poor ravished maid, whose sole shroud is her hair;
For the mother's lament, or the father's despair:
No pity for such thrills the thought of the Czar;
But his spirit leans, tender and yearning, above
The mad helots who riot, rage, murder afar;
To them he is soft as a nest-brooding dove;
But the murdered! alas! they are stinted of love,
Right, justice, or ruth, in the creed of the Czar!
Shall grim carnage goad onward, embruted and base,
The black coursers that strain at her iron-wrought car,
While those of high purpose and fetterless race
Idly gaze on the foul mediæval disgrace
Which poisons all earth from yon realm of the Czar?
Wake, England, your thunders! America, fling
To the wind the shrewd statecrafts that hamper, or mar!
Blend your voices of wrath! your deep warnings outring,
To smite the dulled ears, and blind soul of the king--
Who rules--Heaven help them! Those realms of the Czar!
