You untold life of me,
And all you venerable and innocent joys,
Perennial hardy life of me with joys ’mid rain
and many a summer sun,
And the white snows and night and the wild winds;
O the great patient rugged joys, my soul’s strong
joys unreck’d by man,
(For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have
consciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the
earth,)
Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine,
Our time, our term has come.
Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers,
We who have grandly fill’d our time,
With Nature’s calm content, with tacit huge
delight,
We welcome what we wrought for through the past,
And leave the field for them.
For them predicted long,
For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their
time,
For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest
kings.’
In them these skies and airs, these mountain peaks,
Shasta, Nevadas,
These huge precipitous cliffs, this amplitude, these
valleys, far Yosemite,
To be in them absorb’d, assimilated.
Then to a loftier strain,
Still prouder, more ecstatic rose the chant,
As if the heirs, the deities of the West,
Joining with master-tongue bore part.
Not wan from Asia’s fetiches,
Nor red from Europe’s old dynastic slaughter-house,
(Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left
yet of wars and
scaffolds everywhere,
But come from Nature’s long and harmless throes,
peacefully builded thence,
These virgin lands, lands of the Western shore,
To the new culminating man, to you, the empire new,
You promis’d long, we pledge, we dedicate.
You occult deep volitions,
You average spiritual manhood, purpose of all, pois’d
on yourself,
giving not taking law,
You womanhood divine, mistress and source of all,
whence life and
love and aught that comes
from life and love,
You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials
of America, age
upon age working in death
the same as life,)
You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really
shape and mould
the New World, adjusting it
to Time and Space,
You hidden national will lying in your abysms, conceal’d
but ever alert,
You past and present purposes tenaciously pursued,
may-be
unconscious of yourselves,
Unswerv’d by all the passing errors, perturbations
of the surface;
You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all
creeds, arts,
statutes, literatures,
Here build your homes for good, establish here, these
areas entire,
lands of the Western shore,
We pledge, we dedicate to you.
For man of you, your characteristic race,
Here may he hardy, sweet, gigantic grow, here tower
proportionate to Nature,
Here climb the vast pure spaces unconfined, uncheck’d
by wall or roof,
Here laugh with storm or sun, here joy, here patiently
inure,
Here heed himself, unfold himself, (not others’
formulas heed,)
here fill his time,
To duly fall, to aid, unreck’d at last,
To disappear, to serve.


