The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

A phantom ship with each mast and spar across the moon like a prison bar and a huge Black Hawk that was magnified by its own reflection in the tide. Meanwhile, his friend threw Ali and street wanders and watches with eager ears. Till in the silence around him years, the muster of men at the barrack door. The sound of arms and the tramp of feet and the measured tread of the grenadiers, marching down to their boats on the shore. Then he climbed the tower of the old north church. By the wooden stairs with stealthy tread to the belfry chamber overhead and startled the pigeons from their perch on the somber rafters that round him made masses and moving shapes of shade. But the trembling ladder steep and tall to the highest window in the wall where he paused to listen and look down a moment on the roofs of the town and the moonlight flowing over all. 

Beneath in the churchyard lay the dead in their night encampment in the hill wrapped in silence so deep and still that he could hear like a sentinel's tread the watchful night wind as it went creeping along from tent to tent and seeming to whisper. All is well. A moment only he feels the spell of the place and the hour and the secret dread of the lonely belfry and the dead for suddenly all his thoughts are bent on a shadowy something far away. Where the river widens to meet the bay, a line of black that bends and floats on the rising tide like a bridge of boats. Meanwhile, impatient to mountain ride booted and spurred with a heavy stride on the opposite shore walked Paul Revere. Now he patted his horse's side. Now he gazed at the landscape far and near, then impetuous stamped the earth. And turned and tightened his saddles girth. But mostly he watched with eager search the belfry tower of the old north church, as it rose above the graves on the hill, lonely in spectral and somber and still and low. 

As he looks on the belfry's height a glimmer, and then a gleam of light, he springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, but lingers and gazes till full on his sight, a second lamp of the belfry burns. A hurry of hoofs in a village street, a shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark and beneath from the pebbles and passing a spark, struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet that was all. And yet through the gloom and the light, the fate of a nation was riding that night. The spark struck out by that steed and his flight, kindled in the land and to flame with its heat. He has left a village of mounted the steep and beneath him tranquil and broad and deep as the mystic, meeting the ocean tides. And under the alders that skirt its edge now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledges, heard the tramp of his steed as he rides. It was 12 by the village clock when he crossed the bridge into Medford town. He heard the crowing of the cock and the barking of the farmer's dog and felt the damp of the river fog that rises after the sun goes down. It was won by the village clock when he galloped into Lexington. 

He saw the gilded weathercock, swim in the moonlight as he passed and the meeting house windows black and bear, gaze at him with a spectral glare, as if they already stood aghast at the bloody work they would look upon. It was two by the village clock when he came to the bridge in Concord town. He heard the bleeding of the flock and the Twitter of the birds among the trees and felt the breath of the morning breeze blowing over the metal Brown. And one was safe and asleep in his bed, who at the bridge would be first to fall, who that day would be lying dead. Pierced by a British musket ball. You know the rest in the books you have read how the British regulars fired and fled. Now the farmers gave them ball for ball from behind each fence at farmyard wall, chasing the redcoats down the lane, then crossing the fields to emerge again under the trees at the turn of the road, and only pausing to fire and load. 

So through the night, rode Paul Revere, and so through the night went his cry of alarm to every Middlesex village and farm, the cry of defiance, and not of fear. A voice in the darkness and knock at the door and a word that shall echo forever more. For born on the night wind of the past, through all our history to the last, in the hour of darkness and peril and need, the people will waken and listen to hear. The hurrying hoof beats of that steed and the midnight message of Paul Revere.