Green Mountain Freeman

Poetry.

The terrible deed of the "Nebraska vote," a bill which will do to the nation a creed of woes, gives an interest to these really truthful stanzas:

THE HASHEESH.

BY JOHN G. WHITTIER

Of all the Orient lands can vaunt
Of marvels, with our own competing,
The strangest is the Hasheesh plant,
And what will follow on its eating.

What visions to the taster rise.
Of Dervish or of Almeh dances,
Of Eblis, or of Paradise,
Set all aglow with Houri glances.

The Mollah and the Christian dog
Clap the same pipe beneath their noses;
When Muezzin climbs the synagogue,
The Rabbi shakes his head at Moses !

The Arab by his desert well,
Sits choosing from some Caliph's daughters,
And hears his single camel's bell
Sound welcome to his legal quarters.

The Koran-reader makes complaint,
Of Shitan dancing on and off it;
The robber offers alms; the saint
Drinks tokay and blasphemes the prophet

Such scenes that Eastern plant awakes,
But we have one ordained to beat it-
The Hasheesh of the West, that makes
Or fools, or knaves, of all who eat it.

It makes the merchant class with ware
And other stock in trade, his fellow sinners
And factory lords, with equal care,
Regard their spindles and their spinners.

The preacher eats, and straight appears
The Bible in a new translation
Its angels, negro overseers,
And Heaven itself a snug plantation.

For seraph songs he takes the bark
A bay of blood-hounds northward setting;
The planter for a patriarch,
With servants of his own begetting.

The noisiest Democrat, with ease,
It turns to Slavery's parish beadle;
The shrewdest statesman eats, and sees
Due southward point the polar needle!

The man of peace, about whose dreams
The sweet millennial angels cluster,
Tastes the mad weed, and plots and schemes
A noisy Cuban filibuster!

The Judge partakes, and sits ere long
Upon his bench a railing blackguard;
Declares, off hand, that right is wrong,
And reads the ten commandments backward !

Oh, potent plant! so rare a taste
Has never Turk or Genteel gotten;
The hempen Hasheesh of the East,
Is powerless to our Western Cotton.

*A preparation of the Cannabis Indica, or Indian Hemp,
under the name of Hashish or Haschish, is famous throughout
the Eastern world for its singular narcotic and intoxicating
qualities, producing an agreeable hallucination or fantasia,
and disposing the eater to all kinds of exaggeration and extravagance. The effect of the cotton plant, mental, moral,
religious and political, upon the people of the United States.
would form a proper subject for a medico-philosophical essay
like that of M. Moreau's "Du Haschisch et de l'Alienation
Mentale."

"Cotton !" said a distinguished speaker in Congress, some
years ago, "Cotton! one would think, from the manner in
which gentlemen speak of cotton, that all their conceptions of
good were in that one word, cotton ; that the destinies of this
great nation were bound up in cotton; that the thread of our
fate, which the Parcae are spinning for us, is of cotton."

Speech of the Hon. R. C. Winthrop. -National Era.