Alas! poor fools, the anointed eye may | And Freedom's lightest word can make trace A dead soul's epitaph in every face! them shiver With a base dread that clings to them forever. XXVII. They tell us that our land was made for song, With its huge rivers and sky-piercing peaks, Its sealike lakes and mighty cataracts, Its forests vast and hoar, and prairies wide, And mounds that tell of wondrous tribes extinct. But Poesy springs not from rocks and woods; Her womb and cradle are the human heart, And she can find a nobler theme for song In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore Between the frozen deserts of the poles. All nations have their message from on high, Each the messiah of some central thought, For the fulfilment and delight of Man: One has to teach that labor is divine; Another Freedom; and another Mind; And all, that God is open-eyed and just, The happy centre and calm heart of all. Are, then, our woods, our mountains, and our streams, Needful to teach our poets how to sing? O maiden rare, far other thoughts were ours, When we have sat by ocean's foaming marge, And watched the waves leap roaring on the rocks, Than young Leander and his Hero had, Gazing from Sestos to the other shore. The moon looks down and ocean worships her, Stars rise and set, and seasons come and go Even as they did in Homer's elder time, But we behold them not with Grecian eyes: Then they were types of beauty and of strength, But now of freedom, unconfined and pure, Subject alone to Order's higher law. What cares the Russian serf or Southern slave Though we should speak as man spake never yet Of gleaming Hudson's broad magnifi cence, Or green Niagara's never-ending roar? Our country hath a gospel of her own To preach and practise before all the world, The freedom and divinity of man, The glorious claims of human brotherhood, Which to pay nobly, as a freeman should, Gains the sole wealth that will not fly away, And the soul's fealty to none but God. These are realities, which make the shows Of outward Nature, be they ne'er so grand, Seem small, and worthless, and contemptible. These are the mountain-summits for our bards, Which stretch far upward into heaven itself, And give such wide-spread and exulting view Of hope, and faith, and onward destiny, That shrunk Parnassus to a molehill dwindles. Our new Atlantis, like a morning-star, Silvers the murk face of slow-yielding Night, The herald of a fuller truth than yet Hath gleamed upon the upraised face of Man Since the earth glittered in her stainless prime, Of a more glorious sunrise than of old Drew wondrous melodies from Memnon huge, Yea, draws them still, though now he sit waist-deep In the ingulfing flood of whirling sand, And looks across the wastes of endless gray, Sole wreck, where once his hundred-gated Thebes Pained with her mighty hum the calm, blue heaven: Shall the dull stone pay grateful orisons, And we till noonday bar the splendor out, Lest it reproach and chide our sluggard hearts, Warm-nestled in the down of Prejudice, And be content, though clad with angelwings, Close-clipped, to hop about from perch to perch, In paltry cages of dead men's dead thoughts? O, rather, like the skylark, soar and sing, dumb, And let our gushing songs befit the dawn | Though loud Niagara were to-day struck Whose blithe front turns to greet the Never had poets such high call before, And O, far better, God will not forget. And his mere word makes despots tremble more Than ever Brutus with his dagger could. Wait for no hints from waterfalls or woods, Nor dream that tales of red men, brute and fierce, Repay the finding of this Western World, Spirit supreme of Freedom! not for this Not for this, friendless, on an unknown sea, Coping with mad waves and more mutinous spirits, Battled he with the dreadful ache at heart Which tempts, with devilish subtleties of doubt, The hermit of that loneliest solitude, Yet would this cataract of boiling life Rush plunging on and on to endless deeps, And utter thunder till the world shall cease, A thunder worthy of the poet's song, Of hearts half-darkened back again to 'T is the soul only that is national, Beloved if I wander far and oft From that which I believe, and feel, and know, Thou wilt forgive, not with a sorrowing heart, But with a strengthened hope of better things; Knowing that I, though often blind and false To those I love, and O, more false than Unto myself, have been most true to thee, true Can be as true in all. Therefore thy hope Whether, as now, we journey hand in Or, parted in the body, yet are one The silent desert of a great New Thought; | In spirit and the love of holy things. |