We are not free: doth Freedom, then, consist

In musing with our faces toward the Past,

While petty cares, and crawling interests, twist

Their spider-threads about us, which at last

Grow strong as iron chains, to cramp and bind

In formal narrowness heart, soul, and mind?

Freedom is recreated year by year,
In hearts wide open on the Godward side,
In souls calm-cadenced as the whirling
sphere,

In minds that sway the future like a tide. No broadest creeds can hold her, and no codes;

She chooses men for her august abodes, Building them fair and fronting to the dawn;

Yet, when we seek her, we but find a few

Light footprints, leading morn-ward through the dew:

Before the day had risen, she was gone.

And we must follow: swiftly runs she on, And, if our steps should slacken in de spair,

golden hair,

Forever yielding, never wholly won: That is not love which pauses in the race Two close-linked names on fleeting sand to trace;

Freedom gained yesterday is no more

fold

and chafed,

O poem unsurpassed! it ran

The service of that ample spirit; Paltry seem low dictatorship and throne, Weighed with thy self-renouncing

And so stands Palfrey now, as Marvell stood,

Loyal to Truth dethroned, nor could be wooed

To trust the playful tiger's velvet paws:

And if the second Charles brought in decay

Of ancient virtue, if it well might wring

Souls that had broadened 'neath a nobler day,

To see a losel, marketable king Fearfully watering with his realm's best blood

Cromwell's quenched bolts, that erst had cracked and flamed, Scaring, through all their depths of courtier mud,

Europe's crowned bloodsuckers,
how more ashamed

Ought we to be, who see Corruption's

To the old lecher's clutch a maiden prey,