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Home  »  The Book of the Sonnet  »  Jedidiah Vincent Huntington (1815–1862)

Hunt and Lee, comps. The Book of the Sonnet. 1867.

On Reading Bryant’s Poem of “The Winds”

Jedidiah Vincent Huntington (1815–1862)

YE winds! whose various voices in his lay

That bard interpreted,—your utterance mild,

Nor less your ministration, fierce and wild,

Of those resistless laws which ye obey

In your apparent lawlessness,—O, say,

Is not your will-less agency reviled

When it is likened unto what is styled

By such unwise, The Spirit of the Day?

Not all the islands by tornadoes swept,

E’er knew such ruin as befalls a state,

When not the winds of God, but mortal breath,

With threatening sweetness of melodious hate,

Assaults the fabrics reverent ages kept

To shelter ancient loyalty and faith.