Looks on the sullen sky as stormy-browed As on the waves yon tempest-brooding cloud, Heaves from his aching breast a wailing sigh, Sad as the gust that sweeps the clouded sky.
Ask him his griefs; what midnight demons plough The lines of torture on his lofty brow;
Unlock those marble lips and bid them speak The mystery freezing in his bloodless cheek. His secret? Hid beneath a flimsy word; One foolish whisper that ambition heard; And thus it spake: "Behold yon gilded chair,
The world's one vacant throne, — thy place is there! Ah, fatal dream! What warning spectres meet
In ghastly circle round its shadowy seat! Yet still the Tempter murmurs in his ear
The maddening taunt he cannot choose but hear: "Meanest of slaves, by Gods and men accurst, He who is second when he might be first! Climb with bold front the ladder's topmost round, Or chain thy creeping footsteps to the ground!"
Illustrious Dupe! Have those majestic eyes Lost their proud fire for such a vulgar prize? Art thou the last of all mankind to know That party-fights are won by aiming low? Thou, stamped by Nature with her royal sign,
That party-hirelings hate a look like thine? Shake from thy sense the wild delusive dream! Without the purple, art thou not supreme? And soothed by love unbought, thy heart shall own A nation's homage nobler than its throne!
Is man's the only throbbing heart that hides The silent spring that feeds its whispering tides? Speak from thy caverns, mystery-breeding Earth, Tell the half-hinted story of thy birth,
And calm the noisy champions who have thrown The book of types against the book of stone!
Have ye not secrets, ye refulgent spheres, No sleepless listener of the starlight hears? In vain the sweeping equatorial pries Through every world-sown corner of the skies, To the far orb that so remotely strays Our midnight darkness is its noonday blaze; In vain the climbing soul of creeping man Metes out the heavenly concave with a span, Tracks into space the long-lost meteor's trail,
And weighs an unseen planet in the scale;
Still o'er their doubts the wan-eyed watchers sigh, And Science lifts her still unanswered cry:
"Are all these worlds, that speed their circling flight,
Dumb, vacant, soulless, bawbles of the night?
Warmed with God's smile and wafted by his breath, To weave in ceaseless round the dance of Death? Or rolls a sphere in each expanding zone,
Crowned with a life as varied as our own?"
MAKER of earth and stars! If thou hast taught By what thy voice hath spoke, thy hand hath wrought, By all that Science proves, or guesses true,
More than thy Poet dreamed, thy Prophet knew,- The heavens still bow in darkness at thy feet, And shadows veil thy cloud-pavilioned seat!
Not for ourselves we ask thee to reveal
One awful word beneath the future's seal; What thou shalt tell us, grant us strength to bear; What thou withholdest is thy single care.
Not for ourselves; the present clings too fast, Moored to the mighty anchors of the past;
But when, with angry snap, some cable parts, The sound re-echoing in our startled hearts,
When, through the wall that clasps the harbor round,
And shuts the raving ocean from its bound, Shattered and rent by sacrilegious hands, The first mad billow leaps upon the sands, Then to the Future's awful page we turn, And what we question hardly dare to learn.
Still let us hope! for while we seem to tread The time-worn pathway of the nations dead, Though Sparta laughs at all our warlike deeds, And buried Athens claims our stolen creeds, Though Rome, a spectre on her broken throne, Beholds our eagle and recalls her own,
Though England fling her pennons on the breeze And reign before us Mistress of the seas, While calm-eyed History tracks us circling round Fate's iron pillar where they all were bound, She sees new beacons crowned with brighter flame Than the old watch-fires, like, but not the same! Still in our path a larger curve she finds, The spiral widening as the chain unwinds! No shameless haste shall spot with bandit-crime Our destined empire snatched before its time. Wait, wait, undoubting, for the winds have caught From our bold speech the heritage of thought; No marble form that sculptured truth can wear Vies with the image shaped in viewless air;
And thought unfettered grows through speech to deeds,
As the broad forest marches in its seeds.
What though we perish ere the day is won? Enough to see its glorious work begun! The thistle falls before a trampling clown, But who can chain the flying thistle-down? Wait while the fiery seeds of freedom fly, The prairie blazes when the grass is dry!
What arms might ravish, leave to peaceful arts, Wisdom and love shall win the roughest hearts; So shall the angel who has closed for man The blissful garden since his woes began Swing wide the golden portals of the West, And Eden's secret stand at length confessed!
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