I. AS, flake by flake, the beetling avalanches | |
| Build up their imminent crags of noiseless snow, | |
| Till some chance thrill the loosened ruin launches | |
| In unwarned havoc on the roofs below, | |
| So grew and gathered through the silent years | 5 |
| The madness of a People, wrong by wrong. | |
| There seemed no strength in the dumb toiler’s tears,— | |
| No strength in suffering;—but the Past was strong: | |
| The brute despair of trampled centuries | |
| Leaped up with one hoarse yell and snapped its bands, | 10 |
| Groped for its right with horny, callous hands, | |
| And stared around for God with blood-shot eyes. | |
| What wonder if those palms were all too hard | |
| For nice distinctions,—if that mænad throng— | |
| They whose thick atmosphere no bard | 15 |
| Had shivered with the lightning of his song, | |
| Brutes with the memories and desires of men, | |
| Whose chronicles were writ with iron pen, | |
| In the crooked shoulder and the forehead low— | |
| Set wrong to balance wrong, | 20 |
| And physicked woe with woe? | |
| |
II. They did as they were taught; not theirs the blame, | |
| If men who scattered firebrands reaped the flame: | |
| They trampled Peace beneath their savage feet, | |
| And by her golden tresses drew | 25 |
| Mercy along the pavement of the street. | |
| O Freedom! Freedom! is thy morning-dew | |
| So gory red? Alas, thy light had ne’er | |
| Shone in upon the chaos of their lair! | |
| They reared to thee such symbol as they knew, | 30 |
| And worshipped it with flame and blood, | |
| A Vengeance, axe in hand, that stood | |
| Holding a tyrant’s head up by the clotted hair. | |
| |
III. What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know; | |
| These have found piteous voice in song and prose; | 35 |
| But for the Oppressed, their darkness and their woe, | |
| Their grinding centuries,—what Muse had those? | |
| Though hall and palace had nor eyes nor ears, | |
| Hardening a people’s heart to senseless stone, | |
| Thou knowest them, O Earth, that drank their tears, | 40 |
| O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate moan! | |
| They noted down their fetters, link by link; | |
| Coarse was the hand that scrawled, and red the ink; | |
| Rude was their score, as suits unlettered men,— | |
| Notched with a headsman’s axe upon a block: | 45 |
| What marvel if, when came the avenging shock, | |
’T was At , not Urania, held the pen? | |
| |
IV. With eye averted and an anguished frown, | |
| Loathingly glides the Muse through scenes of strife, | |
| Where, like the heart of Vengeance up and down, | 50 |
| Throbs in its framework the blood-muffled knife; | |
| Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feet | |
| Turn never backward; hers no bloody glare; | |
| Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet, | |
| And where it enters there is no despair: | 55 |
| Not first on palace and cathedral spire | |
| Quivers and gleams that unconsuming fire; | |
| While these stand black against her morning skies, | |
| The peasant sees it leap from peak to peak | |
| Along his hills; the craftsman’s burning eyes | 60 |
| Own with cool tears its influence mother-meek; | |
| It lights the poet’s heart up like a star;— | |
| Ah! while the tyrant deemed it still afar, | |
| And twined with golden threads his futile snare, | |
| That swift, convicting glow all round him ran; | 65 |
| ’T was close beside him there, | |
| Sunrise whose Memnon is the soul of man. | |
| |
V. O Broker-King, is this thy wisdom’s fruit? | |
| A dynasty plucked out as ’t were a weed | |
| Grown rankly in a night, that leaves no seed! | 70 |
| Could eighteen years strike down no deeper root? | |
| But now thy vulture eye was turned on Spain; | |
| A shout from Paris, and thy crown falls off, | |
| Thy race has ceased to reign, | |
| And thou become a fugitive and scoff: | 75 |
| Slippery the feet that mount by stairs of gold, | |
| And weakest of all fences one of steel; | |
| Go and keep school again like him of old, | |
| The Syracusan tyrant;—thou mayst feel | |
| Royal amid a birch-swayed commonweal! | 80 |
| |
VI. Not long can he be ruler who allows | |
| His time to run before him; thou wast naught | |
| Soon as the strip of gold about thy brows | |
| Was no more emblem of the People’s thought: | |
| Vain were thy bayonets against the foe | 85 |
| Thou hadst to cope with; thou didst wage | |
| War not with Frenchmen merely;—no, | |
| Thy strife was with the Spirit of the Age, | |
| The invisible Spirit whose first breath divine | |
| Scattered thy frail endeavor, | 90 |
| And, like poor last year’s leaves, whirled thee and thine | |
| Into the Dark forever! | |
| |
VII. Is here no triumph? Nay, what though | |
| The yellow blood of Trade meanwhile should pour | |
| Along its arteries a shrunken flow, | 95 |
| And the idle canvas droop around the shore? | |
| These do not make a state, | |
| Nor keep it great: | |
| I think God made | |
| The earth for man, not trade; | 100 |
| And where each humblest human creature | |
| Can stand, no more suspicious or afraid, | |
| Erect and kingly in his right of nature, | |
| To heaven and earth knit with harmonious ties,— | |
| Where I behold the exultation | 105 |
| Of manhood glowing in those eyes | |
| That had been dark for ages,— | |
| Or only lit with bestial loves and rages— | |
| There I behold a Nation: | |
| The France which lies | 110 |
| Between the Pyrenees and Rhine | |
| Is the least part of France; | |
| I see her rather in the soul whose shine | |
| Burns through the craftsman’s grimy countenance, | |
| In the new energy divine | 115 |
| Of Toil’s enfranchised glance. | |
| |
VIII. And if it be a dream, | |
| If the great Future be the little Past | |
| ’Neath a new mask, which drops and shows at last | |
| The same weird, mocking face to balk and blast, | 120 |
| Yet, Muse, a gladder measure suits the theme, | |
| And the Tyrtæan harp | |
| Loves notes more resolute and sharp, | |
| Throbbing, as throbs the bosom, hot and fast: | |
| Such visions are of morning, | 125 |
| Theirs is no vague forewarning, | |
| The dreams which nations dream come true, | |
| And shape the world anew; | |
| If this be a sleep, | |
| Make it long, make it deep, | 130 |
| O Father, who sendest the harvests men reap! | |
| While Labor so sleepeth | |
| His sorrow is gone, | |
| No longer he weepeth, | |
| But smileth and steepeth | 135 |
| His thoughts in the dawn; | |
| He heareth Hope yonder | |
| Rain, lark-like, her fancies, | |
| His dreaming hands wander | |
| ’Mid heart’s-ease and pansies; | 140 |
| “’Tis a dream! ’T is a vision!” | |
| Shrieks Mammon aghast; | |
| “The day’s broad derision | |
| Will chase it at last; | |
| Ye are mad, ye have taken | 145 |
| A slumbering kraken | |
| For firm land of the Past!” | |
| Ah! if he awaken, | |
| God shield us all then, | |
| If this dream rudely shaken | 150 |
| Shall cheat him again! | |
| |
IX. Since first I heard our North wind blow, | |
| Since first I saw Atlantic throw | |
| On our grim rocks his thunderous snow | |
| I loved thee, Freedom; as a boy | 155 |
| The rattle of thy shield at Marathon | |
| Did with a Grecian joy | |
| Through all my pulses run; | |
| But I have learned to love thee now | |
| Without the helm upon thy gleaming brow, | 160 |
| A maiden mild and undefiled | |
| Like her who bore the world’s redeeming child; | |
| And surely never did thy altars glance | |
| With purer fires than now in France; | |
| While, in their clear white flashes, | 165 |
| Wrong’s shadow, backward cast, | |
| Waves cowering o’er the ashes | |
| Of the dead, blaspheming Past. | |
| |
| O’er the shapes of fallen giants, | |
| His own unburied brood, | 170 |
| Whose dead hands clench defiance | |
| At the overpowering Good: | |
| And down the happy future run a flood | |
| Of prophesying light; | |
| It shows an Earth no longer stained with blood, | 175 |
| Blossom and fruit where now we see the bud | |
| Of Brotherhood and Right. | |
| |
