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| JERUSALEM, Jerusalem! | |
| If any love thee not, on them | |
| May all thy judgments fall; | |
| For every hope that crowns our earth, | |
| All birth-gifts of her heavenly birth, | 5 |
| To thee she owes them all! | |
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| Deep was thy guilt, and deep thy woe; | |
| The brand of Cain upon thy brow, | |
| Each shore has felt thy tread: | |
| No altar now is thine; no priest; | 10 |
| Upon thy hearth no paschal feast: | |
| The paschal moon is dead. | |
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| When from their height the nations fall, | |
| The kind grave o’er them strews her pall; | |
| They die as mortals die: | 15 |
| But He who looked thee in the face | |
| Stamped there that look no years erase, | |
| His own on Calvary. | |
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| Awe-struck on thee men gaze, and yet | |
| Confess thy greatness, own our debt, | 20 |
| And trembling still revere | |
| The royal family of man, | |
| Supporting thus its blight and ban | |
| With constancy austere. | |
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| Those sciences by us so prized | 25 |
| The sternness of thy strength despised, | |
| Devices light and vain | |
| Of men who lack the might to live | |
| In that repose contemplative | |
| Which Asian souls maintain. | 30 |
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| By thee the Book of Life was writ; | |
| And, wander where it may, with it | |
| Thy soul abroad is sent: | |
| Wherever towers a Christian church, | |
| Palace of earth, Heaven’s sacred porch, | 35 |
| It is thy monument. | |
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| Thy minstrel songs, like sounds wind-borne | |
| From harps on Babel boughs forlorn, | |
| O’er every clime have swept; | |
| And Christian mothers yet grow pale | 40 |
| With echoes faint of Rachel’s wail; | |
| Our maids with Ruth have wept. | |
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| Thou bind’st the present with the past, | |
| The prime of ages with the last; | |
| The golden chain art thou, | 45 |
| On which alone all fates are hung | |
| Of nations springing or upsprung, | |
| Earthward once more to bow. | |
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| Across the world’s tumultuous gate | |
| Thou fling’st thy shadow’s giant weight;— | 50 |
| The mightiest birth of Time; | |
| For all her pangs she may not bear | |
| Until her feast she bids thee share | |
| And mount her throne sublime. | |
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| Far other gaze than that he pours | 55 |
| On empires round thee sunk, and shores | |
| That once in victory shone, | |
| Far other gaze and paler frown | |
| The great Saturnian star bends down | |
| On cedared Lebanon. | 60 |
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| He knows that thou, obscured and dim, | |
| Thus wrestling all night long with him, | |
| Shalt victor rise at last; | |
| Destined thy brows tower-crowned to rear | |
| More high than his declining sphere | 65 |
| When, downward on the blast, | |
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| God’s mightiest angel leaps, and stands | |
| A shape o’ershadowing seas and lands, | |
| And swears by him who swore | |
| A faithful oath and kind to man | 70 |
| Ere worlds were shaped or years began, | |
| That “Time shall be no more.” | |
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