The Morning Star And Catholic Messenger

POLAND.—Aubrey De Vere is the author of the following lines, on the fate of unhappy Catholic Poland, which is suffering under the heel of the most cruel and relentless despotism in Europe—that of the semi-barbarous Russian Czar. Her devoted bishops and fearless priests are in exile, banishment, or prison, for refusing to bow the knee to the modern Baal. Liberty of thought, speech, press, and religion—all the inalienable rights of a Christian man—denied by the remorseless bigotry of the persecuting Muscovite schismatic; and not one word of sympathy for the fallen Poles from the so-called liberal press of the United States. On the contrary, the Sumners, the Greeleys, the Wendell Phillips, the Beechers, and the Stowes, are great admirers of the Russian despotism, which is their only friend on the other side of the water:

When, fixed in righteous wrath, a nation's eye
Torments some crowned tormentor with just hate,
Nor threat nor flattery can that gaze abate;
Unshriven the unatoning years go by;
For as that starry archer in the sky
Unbends not his bright bow, though early and late
The syren sings, the folly weds with fate,
Even so that constellated destiny,
Which keeps firm vigil in a night-black heaven,
Upon the countenance of the doomed, looks forth
Consentient with a nation's gaze on earth:
To the twinned powers a single gaze is given;
The earthly fate reveals the fate on high—
A brazen serpent raised that says, not "live,"
But "die."