And if sometimes a moaning wandereth
    From out thy desolate halls,
If some grim shadow of thy living death
    Across our sunshine falls
  And scares the world to error, 40
The eternal life sends forth melodious breath
  To chase the misty terror.

Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world-noised deeds
    Are silent now in dust,
Gone like a tremble of the huddling reeds
    Beneath some sudden gust;
  Thy forms and creeds have vanished,
Tossed out to wither like unsightly weeds
  From the world’s garden banished.

Whatever of true life there was in thee 50
    Leaps in our age’s veins;
Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery,
    And shake thine idle chains;—­
  To thee thy dross is clinging,
For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see,
  Thy poets still are singing.

Here, mid the bleak waves of our strife and care,
    Float the green Fortunate Isles
Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share
    Our martyrdoms and toils; 60
  The present moves attended
With all of brave and excellent and fair
  That made the old time splendid.

TO THE FUTURE

O Land of Promise! from what Pisgah’s height
  Can I behold thy stretch of peaceful bowers,
Thy golden harvests flowing out of sight,
  Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers? 
  Gazing upon the sunset’s high-heaped gold,
Its crags of opal and of chrysolite,
  Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold
    Still brightening abysses,
    And blazing precipices,
Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven, 10
    Sometimes a glimpse is given
Of thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted blisses.

O Land of Quiet! to thy shore the surf
  Of the perturbed Present rolls and sleeps;
Our storms breathe soft as June upon thy turf
  And lure out blossoms; to thy bosom leaps,
As to a mother’s, the o’erwearied heart,
Hearing far off and dim the toiling mart,
  The hurrying feet, the curses without number,
    And, circled with the glow Elysian 20
    Of thine exulting vision,
Out of its very cares wooes charms for peace and slumber.

To thee the earth lifts up her fettered hands
  And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile
Thou blessest her, and she forgets her bands,
  And her old woe-worn face a little while
Grows young and noble; unto thee the Oppressor
    Looks, and is dumb with awe;
    The eternal law,
Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser, 30
Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding,
    And he can see the grim-eyed Doom
    From out the trembling gloom
Its silent-footed steeds towards his palace goading.