Looks that forti.y despair, Tones more brave than trumpet's breath : Tell me, maidens, have ye known Household charm more sweetly rare? Grace of woman ampler blown? Modesty more debonair? Younger heart with wit full-grown? Our sweetness, our strength, and our star, IV. Whiter than moonshine upon snow Her haughty and far-shining head She bowed to shrive Leonidas With his imperishable dead; Her, too, Morgarten saw, Where the Swiss lion fleshed his icy paw; Where the grim puritan tread Shook Marston, Naseby, and Dunbar ; Yea, on her feet are dearer dyes Yet fresh, nor looked on with untearful eyes. V. Our fathers found her in the woods Where Nature meditates and broods The seeds of unexampled things Which Time to consummation brings Through life and death and man's unstable moods; They met her here, not recognised, A sylvan huntress clothed in furs, To whose chaste wants her bow sufficed, Nor dreamed what destinies were hers: ODE READ AT THE CONCORD CENTENNIAL. 613 She taught them beelike to create Their simpler forms of Church and State; She taught them to endue The Past with other functions than it knew, And turn in channels strange the uncertain stream of Fate; Better than all, she fenced them in their need With iron-handed Duty's sternest creed, 'Gainst Self's lean wolf that ravens word and deed. VI. Why cometh she hither to-day To this low village of the plain Far from the Present's loud highway, From Trade's cool heart and seething brain? Why cometh she? she was not far away; With pathos of immortal gain, 'Tis here her fondest memories stay; And here were men (co-equal with their fate) Who did great things unconscious they were great. With that first answering shot: what then? Long schooled the inward gospel to obey Though leading to the lions' den; They felt the habit-hallowed world give way Unhappy who was last : When Buttrick gave the word, That awful idol of the hallowed Past, Strong in their love and in their lineage strong, Fell crashing; if they heard it not, Yet the earth heard, Nor ever hath forgot, As on from startled throne to throne, Where Superstition sate or conscious Wrong, A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown. Thrice-venerable spot! River more fateful than the Rubicon ! O'er those red planks, to snatch her diadem, Man's Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them, And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on. VII. Think you these felt no charms In their gray homesteads and embowered farms? Their evening step should lighten up no more? In trees their fathers' hands had set And which with them had grown Widening each year their leafy coronet? Felt they no pang of passionate regret For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own? These things are dear to every man that lives, And life prized more for what it lends than gives; Strove to detain their fatal feet : And yet the enduring half they chose, Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king,— The invisible things of God before the seen and known : Therefore their memory inspiration blows With echoes gathering on from zone to zone, And, where it lightened once, from age to age VIII. What marvellous change of things and men ! By who doth right and who refrains, Hers are our losses and our gains, IX. Maiden half mortal, half divine, We triumphed in thy coming; to the brinks ODE READ AT THE CONCORD CENTENNIAL. Our hearts were filled with pride's tumultuous wine; And cares of nobler mood: They won thee: who shall keep thee? From the deeps 615 And many a thwarted hope wrings its weak hands and weeps, I hear the voice as of a mighty wind From all heaven's caverns rushing unconfined, "I, Freedom, dwell with Knowledge: I abide To the slow tracings of the Eternal Mind; Conscience my sceptre is, and law my sword, Implacable as God's word, Like it a shepherd's crook to them that blindly err, Your firm-pulsed sires, my martyrs and my saints, Nor laugh when this one steals and that one lies, Ye shall not be prophetic now, Heralds of ill, that darkening fly Between my vision and the rainbowed sky, From many a blasted bough On Igdrasil's storm-sinewed oak, That once was green, Hope of the West, as thou. Yet pardon if I tremble while I boast, For thee I love as those who pardon most. X. Away, ungrateful doubt, away! |