Grant County Herald

1871.

Eighteen hundred, seventy-one,
Give up thy sceptre and thy crown.
The New Year comes and claims the right
To occupy the throne to-night.
The final station's reached,
Thy power is on the wane.
A new conductor takes
The guidance of the train.
Thy journal only leave,
For savage, saint and sages
Will weep and ponder o'er
Its blood bespattered pages
Aghast the nations stood
And viewed war's horrid dance
While Prussia iron-shod
Crushed out the life of France
And Frenchmen who of yore
Fed on Bologna slice,
Did relish cats and called the bats
Sweet birds from Paradise
And Nap wrote Will this scroll
(For fear he would be shot at.)
"My body and my soul,
Put where they can't be got at."
France for a hero prayed
But heaven denied the boon.
For there the hero's wreath
Became the tyrant's crown.
Willhelm, Bismarck and Von
Moltke are heroes tall;
But heroes grown too great
Make other people small
Let France and Prussia now
Compare their loss and gains;
There's freedom with defeat;
With victory there's chains
Bolts from the Vatican
Have always pelted evil
And from the Holy See
Chased printers and the Devil
The yeasting world outside
Frothed mad with freedom's leaven
Nap left his Holiness
Throned on the mountains seven
Then the Italian king
With cannons, balls and powder,
With horizontal storm
Beat marble blocks to chowder.
And through the widening breach
With all its traps and sin,
The spirit of the nine-
teenth century rushed in.
Pius pleads right divine.
"'Tis false," was the reply:
God through the people votes
His voice, Vox Populi.
Henceforth the throne of kings
Must by the ballot stand
If heaven invests with power
'Tis through the people's hand.
Twin years by wars renowned
What the former years begun
Is finished up in thee,
O eighteen, seventy-two
But the wars waged o'er the sea
Showed but man's feeble ire;
But friends flew homeward to escape
Chicago's "Hell of fire."
O give us Alaric's wrath
His clans with faggot and sword;
Let Attila follow his path
And outdo the "scourge of the Lord."
But spare us, merciful One,
O spare us the fiery day.
When forests leapt in the river of flame
As if in funeral play
And may the coming year
Be kind to our helpless woe.
That our hearts can bleed for another's loss.
Bear witness, Peshtigo!
Lancaster Dec. 31 1871.