| YEARS of the modern! years of the unperform’d! | |
| Your horizon rises—I see it parting away for more august dramas; | |
| I see not America only—I see not only Liberty’s nation, but other nations preparing; | |
| I see tremendous entrances and exits—I see new combinations—I see the solidarity of races; | |
| I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world’s stage; | 5 |
| (Have the old forces, the old wars, played their parts? are the acts suitable to them closed?) | |
| I see Freedom, completely arm’d, and victorious, and very haughty, with Law on one side, and Peace on the other, | |
| A stupendous Trio, all issuing forth against the idea of caste; | |
| —What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach? | |
| I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions; | 10 |
| I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken; | |
| I see the landmarks of European kings removed; | |
| I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, (all others give way;) | |
| —Never were such sharp questions ask’d as this day; | |
| Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God; | 15 |
| Lo! how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest; | |
| His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere—he colonizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes; | |
| With the steam-ship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war, | |
| With these, and the world-spreading factories, he interlinks all geography, all lands; | |
| —What whispers are these, O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas? | 20 |
| Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe? | |
| Is humanity forming, en-masse?—for lo! tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim; | |
| The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war; | |
| No one knows what will happen next—such portents fill the days and nights; | |
| Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to pierce it, is full of phantoms; | 25 |
| Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me; | |
| This incredible rush and heat—this strange extatic fever of dreams, O years! | |
| Your dreams, O year, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I sleep or wake!) | |
| The perform’d America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me, | |
| The unperform’d, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me. | 30 |
