From “Twasinta’s Seminoles” (Canto IV, IX)

There is a time when speech is all too frail,
There is a place where silence speaks the most:
What is the word to paint a human wail,
Or how heroic, speak where all is lost!
He who wears shackles mid his shackled host,
Shows valor’s steel to sturdily behave,
For life is Freedom’s last and real cost,
And so, the last resistance of the brave,
Is that stern silence which to chains prefers grave.