John Pierpont

John Pierpont

John Pierpont (April 6, 1785 – August 27, 1866) was an American poet, who was also successively a teacher, lawyer, merchant, and Unitarian minister. His most famous poem is The Airs of Palestine.

Quotes

Stand! the ground's your own, my braves!
Will ye give it up to slaves?
Will ye look for greener graves?

• Stand! the ground's your own, my braves!
  Will ye give it up to slaves?
  Will ye look for greener graves?
     Hope ye mercy still?
  What's the mercy despots feel?
  Hear it in that battle-peal!
  Read it on yon bristling steel!
     Ask it,—ye who will.
  • "Warren's Address to the American Soldiers" (A Song for the Table, Written for the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Bunker Hill Monument, June 17, 1825), st. 1. Airs of Palestine, and Other Poems (1840), p. 243

• A weapon that comes down as still
  As snowflakes fall upon the sod;
  But executes a freeman's will,
  As lightning does the will of God;
  And from its force nor doors nor locks
  Can shield you,—'t is the ballot-box.
  • A Word from a Petitioner, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• From every place below the skies
  The grateful song, the fervent prayer,—
  The incense of the heart, —may rise
  To heaven, and find acceptance there.
  • Every Place a Temple, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "This is that incense of the heart / Whose fragrance smells to heaven" Nathaniel Cotton, The Fireside, stanza 11.

External links

• The Antislavery Poems of John Pierpont, at the Antislavery Literature Project
• The Tocsin, a broadsheet poem by John Pierpont, at the Antislavery Literature Project
• The Anti-slavery poems of John Pierpont By John Pierpont. Cornell University Library Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection. (Reprinted by) Cornell University Library Digital Collections
• John Pierpont works Cornell University Library Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection