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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.

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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
And sunrise, and the yet unshaken dew
Brimming the chalice of each full-blown
hope,

Whose blithe front turns to greet the
growing day!

Never had poets such high call before,
Never can poets hope for higher one,
And, if they be but faithful to their trust,
Earth will remember them with love and
joy,

And O, far better, God will not forget.
For he who settles Freedom's principles
Writes the death-warrant of all tyranny;
Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to
the heart,

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,
Or needed half the globe to give them
birth:

Spirit supreme of Freedom! not for this
Did great Columbus tame his eagle soul
To jostle with the daws that perch in
courts;

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,
And which alone can fill it with true life.
The high evangel to our country granted
Could make apostles, yea, with tongues
of fire,

Of hearts half-darkened back again to
clay!

'T is the soul only that is national,
And he who pays true loyalty to that
Alone can claim the wreath of patriotism.

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
all

Unto myself, have been most true to thee,
And that whoso in one thing hath been

true

Can be as true in all. Therefore thy hope
May yet not prove unfruitful, and thy love
Meet, day by day, with less unworthy
thanks,

Whether, as now, we journey hand in
hand,

Or, parted in the body, yet are one The silent desert of a great New Thought; | In spirit and the love of holy things.

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