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(From Ode on Venice)
THE NAME of Commonwealth is past and gone, | |
| Over three fractions of the groaning globe:— | |
| Venice is crushed, and Holland deigns to own | |
| A sceptre, and endures a purple robe: | |
| If the free Switzer yet bestrides alone | 5 |
| His chainless mountains, ’t is but for a time; | |
| For tyranny of late has cunning grown, | |
| And, in its own good season, tramples down | |
| The sparkles of our ashes. One great clime, | |
| Whose vigorous offspring by dividing ocean | 10 |
| Are kept apart, and nursed in the devotion | |
| Of Freedom, which their fathers fought for, and | |
| Bequeathed,—a heritage of heart and hand, | |
| And proud distinction from each other land, | |
| Whose sons must bow them at a monarch’s motion, | 15 |
| As if his senseless sceptre were a wand | |
| Full of the magic of exploded science,— | |
| Still one great clime, in full and free defiance, | |
| Yet rears her crest, unconquered and sublime, | |
| Above the far Atlantic! She has taught | 20 |
| Her Esau-brethren that the haughty flag, | |
| The floating fence of Albion’s feebler crag, | |
| May strike to those whose red right hands have bought | |
| Rights cheaply earned with blood. Still, still, forever | |
| Better, though each man’s life-blood were a river | 25 |
| That it should flow and overflow, than creep | |
| Through thousand lazy channels in our veins, | |
| Dammed, like the dull canal, with locks and chains, | |
| And moving, as a sick man in his sleep, | |
| Three paces, and then faltering: better be | 30 |
| Where the extinguished Spartans still are free, | |
| In their proud charnel of Thermopylæ, | |
| Than stagnate in our marsh; or o’er the deep | |
| Fly, and one current to the ocean add, | |
| One spirit to the souls our fathers had, | 35 |
| One freeman more, America, to thee! | |
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