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III

Many loved Truth, and lavished life's best oil
Amid the dust of books to find her,
Content at last, for guerdon of their toil,

With the cast mantle she hath left behind her.
Many in sad faith sought for her,

Many with crossed hands sighed for her;
But these, our brothers, fought for her,
At life's dear peril wrought for her,
So loved her that they died for her,
Tasting the raptured fleetness

Of her divine completeness:
Their higher instinct knew

Those love her best who to themselves are true,
And what they dare to dream of, dare to do;
They followed her and found her
Where all may hope to find,

Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind,
But beautiful, with danger's sweetness round her.
Where faith made whole with deed
Breathes its awakening breath

Into the lifeless creed,

They saw her plumed and mailed,

With sweet, stern face unveiled,

And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.

IV

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;

What is there that abides

To make the next age better for the last?

Is earth too poor to give us

Something to live for here that shall outlive us?

Some more substantial boon

Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon?

The little that we see

From doubt is never free;

The little that we do

Is but half-nobly true;

With our laborious hiving

What men call treasure, and the gods call dross,
Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving,

Only secure in every one's conniving,

A long account of nothings paid with loss,

Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires,
After our little hour of strut and rave,

With all our pasteboard passions and desires,
Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires,
Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave.
But stay! no age was e'er degenerate,
Unless men held it at too cheap a rate,
For in our likeness still we shape our fate.
Ah, there is something here
Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer,
Something that gives our feeble light
A high immunity from Night,
Something that leaps life's narrow bars

To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven;
A seed of sunshine that can leaven
Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars,
And glorify our clay

With light from fountains elder than the Day;
A conscience more divine than we,
A gladness fed with secret tears,
A vexing, forward-reaching sense
Of some more noble permanence;
A light across the sea,

Which haunts the soul and will not let it be,
Still beaconing from the heights of undegenerate years.

VI

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,

Whom late the Nation he had led,
With ashes on her head,

Wept with the passion of an angry grief:
Forgive me, if from present things I turn
To speak what in my heart will beat and burn,
And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn.

Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote:

For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw,
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
Of the unexhausted West,

With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,

Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
How beautiful to see

Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,
Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;
One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,
Not lured by any cheat of birth,

But by his clear-grained human worth,

And brave old wisdom of sincerity!

They knew that outward grace is dust;
They could not choose but trust

In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill,
And supple-tempered will

That bent like perfect steel to spring again and thrust.
His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind,
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars,
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind;
Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined,
Fruitful and friendly for all human kind,

Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars.
Nothing of Europe here,

Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still,
Ere any names of Serf and Peer
Could Nature's equal scheme deface
And thwart her genial will;

Here was a type of the true elder race,

And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face. I praise him not; it were too late;

And some innative weakness there must be

In him who condescends to victory

Such as the Present gives, and cannot wait,
Safe in himself as in a fate.

So always firmly he:

He knew to bide his time,
And can his fame abide,

Still patient in his simple faith sublime,
Till the wise years decide.

Great captains, with their guns and drums,
Disturb our judgment for the hour,
But at last silence comes;

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,

The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.

IX

But is there hope to save

Even this ethereal essence from the grave?
What ever 'scaped Oblivion's subtle wrong
Save a few clarion names, or golden threads of song?
Before my musing eye

The mighty ones of old sweep by,

Disvoiced now and insubstantial things,

As noisy once as we; poor ghosts of kings,
Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust,

And many races, nameless long ago,

To darkness driven by that imperious gust
Of ever-rushing Time that here doth blow:
O visionary world, condition strange,
Where naught abiding is but only Change,

Where the deep-bolted stars themselves still shift and range!

Shall we to more continuance make pretence?
Renown builds tombs; a life-estate is Wit;

And, bit by bit,

The cunning years steal all from us but woe;
Leaves are we, whose decays no harvest sow.
But, when we vanish hence,

Shall they lie forceless in the dark below,
Save to make green their little length of sods,
Or deepen pansies for a year or two,

Who now to us are shining-sweet as gods?
Was dying all they had the skill to do?
That were not fruitless: but the Soul resents
Such short-lived service, as if blind events
Ruled without her, or earth could so endure;
She claims a more divine investiture

Of longer tenure than Fame's airy rents;
Whate'er she touches doth her nature share;
Her inspiration haunts the ennobled air,
Gives eyes to mountains blind,

Ears to the deaf earth, voices to the wind,
And her clear trump sings succor everywhere
By lonely bivouacs to the wakeful mind;
For soul inherits all that soul could dare:
Yea, Manhood hath a wider span
And larger privilege of life than man.
The single deed, the private sacrifice,
So radiant now through proudly-hidden tears,
Is covered up erelong from mortal eyes

With thoughtless drift of the deciduous years;
But that high privilege that makes all men peers,
That leap of heart whereby a people rise

Up to a noble_anger's height,

And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more bright,

That swift validity in noble veins,

Of choosing danger and disdaining shame,
Of being set on flame

By the pure fire that flies all contact base
But wraps its chosen with angelic might,
These are imperishable gains,
Sure as the sun, medicinal as light,

These hold great futures in their lusty reins
And certify to earth a new imperial race.

JULIA WARD HOWE (1819-1910)

Battle-Hymn of the Republic

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring

lamps.

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall

deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on."

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat: Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

One's-self I Sing

One's-self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse,

I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing.

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