Classic Poem

Where Swedes their fortress laid
And Dutch about them hovered,
There came a married maid
And beauty rediscovered;
" O, in a dream, my dear,
I saw this situation,
And dreamed our home was here
Upon this noble station! "

Right loving was her spouse —
A gentle, though a Quaker —
He pitched for her a house
And fenced an airy acre,
And where Altona span,
The meeting creeks commanding,
New Wilmington began —
A millsite and a landing.

The Friends of Chester drove
Down from their hills to settle
Within the bulrush cove
And forged the iron metal;
The smiths the sailors are,
The wheelwright vessels braces,
And down the Delaware
They sailed to foreign places.

Close by the waterfall
Refreshed the tidal rising,
The Old Swedes' graveyard wall
The shipyards are surprising;
Morocco vats increase;
Wars sent us exiles prouder;
And in the Quaker peace
They manufactured powder.

The ruling city sent
Its fever-fearing masses;
Young lawyers pitched their tent
Among our landed lassies;
Our creeks were battle meads,
But we were never vassal,
Though British stole our deeds
Away from old New Castle.

There where great Stuyvesant slipped
Accoutred (in the fables),
The pillory long tipped
That ancient bowery's gables;
No county jail its ghosts
Disturbed our century's labor,
The fondled whipping-post
Conceded to our neighbor.

But slowly up the hills
Calm Wilmington was moving,
Like motion of her mills
The grist of growing proving,
Till Brandywine serene,
Flowed coal our blasts that feeded,
And lily-loved Christine
The iron highways speeded.

Back from the floody river,
As from the greater mart,
Our temperate pulses quiver
And beats our city's heart;
And from our workshop, winking,
Like strong thoughts from the brain,
Our engines speak our thinking,
Our navies ride the main.

Within the tangent's curve a
Head domes our State above
Born like his child, Minerva,
Within the skull of Jove,
And like a Hermes rising
The sea-laved hills upon,
Shines, bright and enterprising,
The light of Wilmington!