Why for his power benign seek an impurer source? His was the true enthusiasm that burns long, Domestically bright, Fed from itself and shy of human sight, The hidden force that makes a lifetime strong, And not the short-lived fuel of a song. Passionless, say you? What is passion for But to sublime our natures and control To front heroic toils with late return, Or none, or such as shames the conqueror? That fire was fed with substance of the soul And not with holiday stubble, that could burn, Unpraised of men who after bonfires As in the dear old unestranged days Before the inevitable wrong began? Mother of States and undiminished men, Thou gavest us a country, giving him, And we owe alway what we owed thee then : The boon thou wouldst have snatched from us agen Shines as before with no abatement dim. A great man's memory is the only thing With influence to outlast the present whim And bind us as when here he knit our golden ring. All of him that was subject to the hours Lies in thy soil and makes it part of ours: Across more recent graves, Where unresentful Nature waves Her pennons o'er the shot-ploughed sod, Proclaiming the sweet Truce of God, We from this consecrated plain stretch out Our hands as free from afterthought or doubt As here the united North Poured her embrowned manhood forth In welcome of our savior and thy son. Through battle we have better learned thy worth, The long-breathed valor and undaunted will, Which, like his own, the day's disaster done, Could, safe in manhood, suffer and be still. Both thine and ours the victory hardly won; If ever with distempered voice or pen We have misdeemed thee, here we take it back, And for the dead of both don common black. Be to us evermore as thou wast then, As we forget thou hast not always been, Mother of States and unpolluted men, Virginia, fitly named from England's manly queen! AN ODE FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1876. I. I. ENTRANCED I saw a vision in the cloud That loitered dreaming in yon sunset sky, Full of fair shapes, half creatures of the eye, Half chance-evoked by the wind's fantasy In golden mist, an ever-shifting crowd: There, mid unreal forms that came and went In robes air-spun, of evanescent dye, A woman's semblance shone pre-eminent; Not armed like Pallas, not like Hera proud, But, as on household diligence intent, Beside her visionary wheel she bent Like Arete or Bertha, nor than they Less queenly in her port: about her knee Glad children clustered confident in play: Placid her pose, the calm of energy; And over her broad brow in many a round (That loosened would have gilt her garment's hem), Succinct, as toil prescribes, the hair was wound In lustrous coils, a natural diadem. The cloud changed shape, obsequious to the whim Of some transmuting influence felt in me, And, looking now, a wolf I seemed to see Limned in that vapor, gaunt and hunger-bold, Threatening her charge: resolve in every limb, Erect she flamed in mail of sun-wove gold, Penthesilea's self for battle dight; spear, And one her adamantine shield made light; Crash of navies and wave-borne thun. der; Then drifted the cloud-rack a-lee, Each by her sisters made bright, 4. Stormy the day of her birth: |