Classic Poem

Ring on, dissentient cries,
Whose boisterous echoes rise
And fill with acrimonious vaunts the unsympathetic skies!
I neither praise nor blame
The lineage you proclaim;
Not mine the arbitrament that seals your glory or your shame.

Perchance I too might sing
Of army and court and king,
Of proud pictorial episodes where swords and helmets ring.
Perchance my voice might tell
What happy memories dwell
Where England's meadowy distances like music fall and swell.

But rather would I find
In the onward march of mind
Strong right to achieve supremacy and rule above my kind.
For me 't was given to know
Gross prejudice flung low,
And science levelling fable in victorious overthrow.

Philosophy's full beam
Has bathed my honored stream,
And guided men toward nobler moods than superstitious dream.
Here fact, crying out " I am, "
Stripped sophistry of sham;
Here throve the effulgent intellect of matchless Verulam.

Here temperate self-control
Calmed freedom's fiery soul,
Reversing her impetuous course toward wisdom's rugged goal;
Here reason's lips have wound
The clarion whose clear sound
Sent dogma whimpering from the prey its greedy fangs had found.

Tired out with guile, intrigue,
An irresistible league,
My people in fervid action showed their agonized fatigue.
Not with the crimson reek
Of scaffolds did they speak,
But through the broadening girth of limbs that made their fetters weak.

Lo, now the shadow is fled
Whose blackness overspread
The starry undaunted eyes of truth and her seraphic head;
Lo, progress, harshly wroth,
Frights bigotry like a moth
When brushed from out the broideries of some ancient arras-cloth.

The mightier minds no more
Waste effort to explore
Infinity's ocean, breaking on an unconjectured shore.
They turn from the empty task
Of tearing her close mask
Off the Isis whose oracular mouth denies them what they ask.

Their impulse aims, instead,
With equal steps to tread
The arduous jeopardy called life, where many a foot has bled;
They heed the woful tone
Of crushed humanity's moan;
They leave the unknowable to dwell at peace with God, the unknown.

They hold as worthiest prayer
To assuage the long despair
That poverty's fell ubiquity makes drudging millions bear;
They search, by pity taught,
All the arsenals of thought
For weapons murderous to the wrongs that ignorance has wrought.

They see, like streaks of day
In heaven's far doubtful gray,
The auroral evidence of love, and hate's dark disarray.
They send toward purer things
Desires whose journeyings
Are larks that dare the unventured dusk with sweet adventurous wings.

Yet while by stubborn deeds
Their fresh unfaltering creeds
Have reached through hollow pomps of cant reality's vital needs,
Ah, where on the earth save here,
Co-operant in career,
Do all man's godliest attributes converge and persevere?