Our fortress is the good greenwood, Our tent the cypress tree; We know the forest round us As seamen know the sea. We know its walls of thorny vines, Its glades of reedy grass, Its safe and silent islands Within the dark morass. –Bryant. The close of the year 1780 was, in the Southern States,…
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Bennington
We are but warriors for the working-day; Our gayness and our guilt are all besmirch’d With rainy marching in the painful field; There’s not a piece of feather in our host (Good argument, I hope, we shall not fly), And time hath worn us into slovenry. But, by the mass, our hearts are in the…
The Battle of Trenton
And such they are–and such they will be found: Not so Leonidas and Washington, Their every battle-field is holy ground Which breathes of nations saved, not worlds undone. How sweetly on the ear such echoes sound! While the mere victor’s may appal or stun The servile and the vain, such names will be A watchword…
George Rogers Clark and the Conquest of the Northwest
Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers! O Pioneers! All the past we leave behind, We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world; Fresh and strong the world we seize,…
Daniel Boone and the Founding of Kentucky
. . . Boone lived hunting up to ninety; And, what’s still stranger, left behind a name For which men vainly decimate the throng, Not only famous, but of that GOOD fame, Without which glory’s but a tavern song,– Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame, Which hate nor envy e’er could tinge with wrong; ‘T…