Mount Hope, R. I.

KING PHILIP.

N Pokanoket's height

ΟΝ

All life is hushed beneath the summer heat;
No human step is heard from morn to night,
And echo can repeat

Naught but the lonely fish-hawk's piercing screams,
As swooping downward to the placid bay,

To touch the water's breast he scarcely seems,

Then slow flies homeward with his struggling prey, Where mate and clamorous young hang eager o'er Their nest upon the blasted sycamore.

Yon little grove of trees

Waves soundless in the breeze

That wanders down the slope;

Hushed by the countless memories

Which cluster round thy crest, renowned Mount Hope.

How fair the scene!

The city's gleaming spires, the clustering towns,
The modest villages, half hid in green,

Soft hills and grassy downs,

The dark-blue waves of Narragansett Bay,

Flecked with the snowflakes of an hundred sail, And, southward, in the distance, cold and gray, Newport lies sleeping in her foggy veil.

Beyond the eastern waves,
Where Taunton River laves
The harbor's sandy edges,

Queen of a thousand iron slaves,
Fall River nestles in her granite ledges.

*

When here King Philip stood,

Or rested in the niche we call his throne,
He looked o'er hill and vale and swelling flood,
Which once were all his own.

Before the white man's footstep, day by day,
As the sea-tides encroach upon the sand,
He saw his proud possessions melt away,
And found himself a king without a land.
Constrained by unknown laws,

Judged guilty without cause,
Maddened by treachery,

What wonder that his tortured spirit rose,
And turned upon his foes,

And told his wrongs in words that still we see
Recorded on the page of history.

Anonymous.

MOUNT HOPE.

HE morning air was freshly breathing,

THE

The morning mists were wildly wreathing;
Day's earliest beams were kindling o'er
The wood-crowned hills and murmuring shore.
'T was summer; and the forests threw

Their checkered shapes of varying hue,
In mingling, changeful shadows seen,
O'er hill and bank, and headland green.
Blithe birds were carolling on high
Their matin music to the sky,
As glanced their brilliant hues along,
Filling the groves with life and song;
All innocent and wild and free
Their sweet, ethereal minstrelsy.
The dew-drop sparkled on the spray,
Danced on the wave the inconstant ray;
And moody grief, with dark control,
There only swayed the human soul!

With equal swell, above the flood,
The forest-cinctured mountain stood;
Its eastward cliffs, a rampart wild,
Rock above rock sublimely piled.
What scenes of beauty met his eye,
The watchful sentinel on high!
With all its isles and inlets lay
Beneath, the calm, majestic bay;
Like molten gold, all glittering spread,
Where the clear sun his influence shed;
In wreathy, crispéd brilliance borne,
While laughed the radiance of the morn.
Round rocks, that from the headlands far
Their barriers reared, with murmuring war,
The chafing stream, in eddying play,
Fretted and dashed its foamy spray;
Along the shelving sands its swell

With hushed and equal cadence fell;
And here, beneath the whispering grove,
Ran rippling in the shadowy cove.
Thy thickets with their liveliest hue,
Aquetnet green! were fair to view;
Far curved the winding shore, where rose
Pocasset's hills in calm repose;
Or where descending rivers gave
Their tribute to the ampler wave.
merging frequent from the tide,
Scarce noticed mid its waters wide,
Lay flushed with morning's roseate smile,
The gay bank of some little isle ;
Where the lone heron plumed his wing,
Or spread it as in act to spring,

Yet paused, as if delight it gave
To bend above the glorious wave.

James Wallis Eastburn.

MOUNT HOPE.

MOUNT HOPE, the highest headland in Rhode Island, was the ancient seat of Metacomet, -"King Philip,” · -the indomitable chief of the Wampanoags. When, after a long and bloody war, he was conquered and killed at last, his wife-Queen Wootonekanusky-was dragged from her home on Mount Hope, and sold into slavery in Barbadoes.

I

STROLL through verdant fields to-day,

Through waving woods and pastures sweet,

To the red warrior's ancient seat

Where liquid voices of the bay

Babble in tropic tongues around its rocky feet.

I put my lips to Philip's spring;

I sit in Philip's granite chair;

And thence I climb up, stair by stair,

And stand where once the savage king

Stood and with eye of hawk cleft the blue round of air.

On Narragansett's sunny breast

This necklace of fair islands shone,

And Philip, muttering, "All

my own!"

Looked north and south and east and west,

And waved his sceptre from this alabaster throne.

His beacon on Pocasset hill,

Lighting the hero's path to fame
Whene'er the crafty Pequot came,

Blazed as the windows of yon mill
Now blaze at set of sun with day's expiring flame.

Always, at midnight, from a cloud,

An eagle swoops, and hovering nigh
This peak, utters one piercing cry

Of wrath and anguish, long and loud,
And plunges once again into the silent sky!

The Wampanoags, long since dead,

Who to these islands used to cling,

Spake of this shrieking midnight thing

With bated breath, and, shuddering, said,

"'Tis angry Philip's voice, the spectre of the king!"