Classic Poem

I.

Republic, made at length
Splendid for stately strength,
O thou at once our glory and hope and pride.
Hear us, for at thy knee
Gathering, we thrill to be
Children of those that in thy lordly cause once died!
Thou wert an ungrown power, in that far time
Of eager patriots, dying for the right:
But now, with mien imperial and sublime,
No more a youngling weak and slight,
Thou standest, viewed by many a neighbor clime,
Clothed with a terrible majesty like light,
Awful yet strangely lovely in thy maiden might!

II.

Now past its hundredth year,
Thy green youth bursts its bud,
Aloe-like blossoming into beauteous flower;
A bloom whose petals clear
Gleam with no stains of blood
From slaughterous Malvern's rout or hot Antietam's hour.
All memories now of those distracted years
Are swept from thy sweet name,
And lo, the pureness of thy virginal fame
Radiantly white appears,
Washed clean from any shadow of soiling blame
By pitiful and penitential tears!
From palm-plumed lands that tropic water laves
To where the Atlantic hurls on rugged Maine
The cold green turbulence of his massive waves,
Alike to South and North the unnumbered slain
Speak with soft eloquence of one common pain,
In the mute pathos of their multitudinous graves!

III.

There are who name thee with a mournful sigh,
Our country, murmuring how that chaste ideal
Which great-souled dreamers loved in days gone by,
Is now substantiate in this earthy real!
These point to many a fraud and loathsome lie;
To ignorance throned where wisdom's word should rule;
To gold's insatiate lust,
Or bribery's acrid poison, rotting trust,
Till the pure statesman turns the vulgar lobbyist's tool;
To liberty in the slanderer's lawless pen;
Equality in the plutocrat's curled lip,
And in the plunderous leagues of public men
Fraternity's millennial fellowship!
These question where our leaders live,
Loftily representative,
Free in their reverent vassalage to right;
Not making high responsibilities don
The liveried menial's plight;
Not following where brute avarice may bid,
That while their fleeting terms of power lapse on,
Gross personal booty may be well increased, —
Like lacqueys among their master's pantries hid,
Guzzling the wine-lees of the feast!
And other cavillers, honestly enough,
Ask if our popular order, civic worth,
The old strong heroic stuff,
Be evident in this regretful dearth,
While all the intrigues of greedy railroad kings
With steam are symbolling their own pompous puff,
Illusory credit, light repute on earth,
And virtues flung to the winds like weightless things!
Yet others ask what welfare may abide
In desolate Southern homes where famine's creep
Grows stealthier toward the final leap;
Where rusts the unnoted implement beside
The ungathered harvest's growth,
And where the famishing negro is not loath,
With poor brain fed on its new blood-bought pride,
To loll in his emancipated sloth!

IV.

Ah, cavillers, wherefore gaze
Only upon the shadow of that dear shape,
Our bright Republic, heir of the unborn days,
Nor look toward where the godlike tresses drape
A brow of luminous majesty and eyes
Unfathomable as deeps of dawn-bathed skies?
Nay, who shall solve the awful riddle of time?
The veil of the inmost temple who shall rend?
If discords break the solemn centuries' chime,
Why may not these, even these, divinely blend
Toward some serene and unimagined end,
To breathe some grander harmony that our ear
May no more hear
Than some slight shell, pale waif of the outer tide
Tossed lightly upon some shore,
Down in its fragile roseate whorl may hide
The resonance of all ocean's haughty roar!
Nay, cavillers, for a moment pause ...
Does liberty shine less brilliantly to-day
Because within man's breast that spark of the god
Would seem to prophesy its own decay?
Is slavery less of sacrilege because
His freedom finds the slave an indolent clod?
Or peace less beautiful because men still slay?
Ah! let us not forget
That the effort once to grandly do is more
Than myriads of achievements aimed less high;
And that when a people's purpose hath been set
Toward some end nobler yet,
Some loftier goal of good unsought before,
Then deeds and words that cannot utterly die
Leap into life with a flash whence men are shown
Eternal Truth calm-browed on her eternal throne!