In my long-suffering and strength to meet
With equal front the direst shafts of fate,
Than thou in thy faint-hearted despotism,
Girt with thy baby-toys of force and wrath.
Yes, I am that Prometheus who brought down
The light to man which thou in selfish fear
Had'st to thyself usurped,-his by sole right,
For Man hath right to all save Tyranny,-
And which shall free him yet from thy frail throne.
Tyrants are but the spawn of Ignorance,
Begotten by the slaves they trample on,
Who, could they win a glimmer of the light,
And see that Tyranny is always weakness,
Or Fear with its own bosom ill at ease,
Would laugh away in scorn the sand-wove chain
Which their own blindness feigned for adamant.
Wrong ever builds on quicksands, but the Right
To the firm centre lays its moveless base.
The tyrant trembles if the air but stirs
The innocent ringlets of a child's free hair,
And crouches, when the thought of some great spirit,
With world-wide murmur, like a rising gale,
Over men's hearts, as over standing corn,
Rushes, and bends them to its own strong will.
So shall some thought of mine yet circle earth
And puff away thy crumbling altars, Jove.
And, would'st thou know of my supreme revenge,
Poor tyrant, even now dethroned in heart,
Realmless in soul, as tyrants ever are,
Listen! and tell me if this bitter peak,
This never-glutted vulture, and these chains
Shrink not before it; for it shall befit
A sorrow-taught, unconquered Titan-heart.
Men, when their death is on them, seem to stand
On a precipitous crag that overhangs
The abyss of doom, and in that depth to see,
As in a glass, the features dim and huge
Of things to come, the shadows, as it seems,
Of what have been. Death ever fronts the wise,
Not fearfully, but with clear promises
Of larger life, on whose broad vans upborne,
Their out-look widens, and they see beyond
The horizon of the Present and the Past,
Even to the very source and end of things.
Such am I now immortal woe hath made
My heart a seer, and my soul a judge
Between the substance and the shadow of Truth.
The sure supremeness of the Beautiful,
By all the martyrdoms made doubly sure
Of such as I am, this is my revenge,
Which of my wrongs builds a triumphal arch
Through which I see a sceptre and a throne.
The pipings of glad shepherds on the hills,
Tending the flocks no more to bleed for thee,-
The songs of maidens pressing with white feet
The vintage on thine altars poured no more,-
The murmurous bliss of lovers, underneath
Dim grape-vine bowers, whose rosy bunches press
Not half so closely their warm cheeks, unscared
By thoughts of thy brute lusts,—the hivelike hum
Of peaceful commonwealths, where sunburnt Toil
Reaps for itself the rich earth made its own
By its own labor, lightened with glad hymns
To an omnipotence which thy mad bolts
Would cope with as a spark with the vast sea,
Even the spirit of free love and peace,
Duty's sure recompense through life and death,—
These are such harvests as all master-spirits
Reap, haply not on earth, but reap no less
Because the sheaves are bound by hands not theirs;
These are the bloodless daggers wherewithal
They stab fallen tyrants, this their high revenge:
For their best part of life on earth is when,
Long after death, prisoned and pent no more,
Their thoughts, their wild dreams even, have become
Part of the necessary air men breathe;
When, like the moon, herself behind a cloud,
They shed down light before us on life's sea,
That cheers us to steer onward still in hope.
Earth with her twining memories ivies o'er
Their holy sepulchres, the chainless sea
In tempest or wide calm repeats their thoughts,
The lightning and the thunder, all free things,
Have legends of them for the ears of men.
All other glories are as falling stars,
But universal Nature watches theirs :
Such strength is won by love of human kind.
Not that I feel that hunger after fame,
Which souls of a half-greatness are beset with;
But that the memory of noble deeds
Cries shame upon the idle and the vile,
And keeps the heart of Man for ever up
To the heroic level of old time.
To be forgot at first is little pain
To a heart conscious of such high intent
As must be deathless on the lips of men;
But, having been a name, to sink and be
A something which the world can do without,
Which, having been or not, would never change
The lightest pulse of fate,-this is indeed
A cup of bitterness the worst to taste,
And this thy heart shall empty to the dregs.
Oblivion is lonelier than this peak,-
Behold thy destiny! Thou think'st it much
That I should brave thee, miserable god!
But I have braved a mightier than thou,
Even the temptings of this soaring heart
Which might have made me, scarcely less than thou,
A god among my brethren weak and blind,
Scarce less than thou, a pitiable thing,
To be down-trodden into darkness soon.
But now I am above thee, for thou art
The bungling workmanship of fear, the block
That scares the swart Barbarian; but I
Am what myself have made, a nature wise
With finding in itself the types of all,
With watching from the dim verge of the time
What things to be are visible in the gleams
Thrown forward on them from the luminous past,
Wise with the history of its own frail heart,
With reverence and sorrow, and with love
Broad as the world for freedom and for man.
Thou and all strength shall crumble, except Love,
By whom and for whose glory ye shall cease:
And, when thou art but a dim moaning heard
From out the pitiless glooms of Chaos, I
Shall be a power and a memory,
A name to scare all tyrants with, a light
Unsetting as the pole-star, a great voice
Heard in the breathless pauses of the fight
By truth and freedom ever waged with wrong,
Clear as a silver trumpet, to awake
Huge echoes that from age to age live on
In kindred spirits, giving them a sense
Of boundless power from boundless suffering wrung.
And many a glazing eye shall smile to see
The memory of my triumph, (for to meet
Wrong with endurance, and to overcome
The present with a heart that looks beyond,
Are triumph), like a prophet eagle, perch
Upon the sacred banner of the right.
Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed,
And feeds the green earth with its swift decay,
Leaving it richer for the growth of truth;
But Good, once put in action or in thought,
Like a strong oak, doth from its boughs shed down
The ripe germs of a forest. Thou, weak god,
Shalt fade and be forgotten; but this soul,
Fresh-living still in the serene abyss,
In every heaving shall partake, that grows
From heart to heart among the sons of men,—
As the ominous hum before the earthquake runs
Far through the Ægean from roused isle to isle,—
Foreboding wreck to palaces and shrines,
And mighty rents in many a cavernous error
That darkens the free light to man :-This heart
Unscarred by thy grim vulture, as the truth
Grows but more lovely 'neath the beaks and claws
Of Harpies blind that fain would soil it, shall
In all the throbbing exultations share
That wait on freedom's triumphs, and in all
The glorious agonies of martyr-spirits,-
Sharp lightning-throes to split the jagged clouds
That veil the future, showing them the end,-
Pain's thorny crown for constancy and truth,
Girding the temples like a wreath of stars.
This is a thought, that, like the fabled laurel,
Makes my faith thunder-proof, and thy dread bolts
Fall on me like the silent flakes of snow
On the hoar brows of aged Caucasus :
But, O thought far more blissful, they can rend
This cloud of flesh, and make my soul a star!
Unleash thy crouching thunders now, O Jove!
Free this high heart which, a poor captive long,
Doth knock to be let forth, this heart which still,
In its invincible manhood, overtops
Thy puny godship as this mountain doth
The pines that moss its roots. O even now,
While from my peak of suffering I look down,
Beholding with a far-spread gush of hope
The sunrise of that Beauty in whose face,
Shone all around with love, no man shall look
But straightway like a god he is uplift,
Unto the throne long empty for his sake,
And clearly oft foreshadowed in wide dreams
By his free inward nature, which nor thou,
Nor any anarch after thee, can bind
From working its great doom,-now, now set free
This essence, not to die, but to become
Part of that awful Presence which doth haunt
The palaces of tyrants, to scare off,
With its grim eyes and fearful whisperings
And hideous sense of utter loneliness,
All hope of safety, all desire of peace,
All but the loathed forefeeling of blank death,-
Part of that spirit which doth ever brood
In patient calm on the unpilfered nest
Of man's deep heart, till mighty thoughts grow fledged
To sail with darkening shadow o'er the world,
Until they swoop, and their pale quarry make
Of some o'erbloated wrong,-that spirit which
Scatters great hopes in the seed-field of man,
Like acorns among grain, to grow and be
A roof for freedom in all coming time.
But no, this cannot be; for ages yet,
In solitude unbroken, shall I hear
The angry Caspian to the Euxine shout,
And Euxine answer with a muffled roar,
On either side storming the giant walls
Of Caucasus with leagues of climbing foam,
(Less, from my height, than flakes of downy snow),
That draw back baffled but to hurl again,
Snatched up in wrath and horrible turmoil,
Mountain on mountain, as the Titans erst,
My brethren, scaling the high seat of Jove,
Heaved Pelion upon Ossa's shoulders broad,
In vain emprise. The moon will come and go
With her monotonous vicissitude;
Once beautiful, when I was free to walk
Among my fellows and to interchange
The influence benign of loving eyes,
But now by aged use grown wearisome;
False thought! most false! for how could I endure
These crawling centuries of lonely woe
Unshamed by weak complaining, but for thee,
Loneliest, save me, of all created things,
Mild-eyed Astartè, my best comforter,
With thy pale smile of sad benignity?
Year after year will pass away and seem
To me, in mine eternal agony,
But as the shadows of dumb summer-clouds,
Which I have watched so often darkening o'er
The vast Sarmatian plain, league-wide at first,
But, with still swiftness, lessening on and on
Till cloud and shadow meet and mingle where
The grey horizon fades into the sky,
Far, far to northward. Yes, for ages yet
Must I lie here upon my altar huge,
As it hath been, his portion; endless doom,
While the immortal with the mortal linked
Dreams of its wings and pines for what it dreams
With upward yearn unceasing. Better so:
For wisdom is meek sorrow's patient child,
And empire over self, and all the deep
Strong charities that make men seem like gods;
And love, that makes them be gods, from her breasts
Sucks in the milk that makes mankind one blood.
Good never comes unmixed, or so it seems,
Having two faces, as some images
Are carved, of foolish gods; one face is ill,
But one heart lies beneath, and that is good,
As are all hearts, when we explore their depths.
Therefore, great heart, bear up! thou art but type
Of what all lofty spirits endure, that fain
Would win men back to strength and peace through love :
Each hath his lonely peak, and on each heart
Envy, or scorn, or hatred, tears lifelong
With vulture beak; yet the high soul is left,
And faith, which is but hope grown wise, and love,
And patience which at last shall overcome.
Cambridge, Mass., June, 1843.
FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTH OF JULY, BY THE REPEAL ASSOCIATION OF PHILADELPHIA. (Adapted to the music of the Marseillaise Hymn.)
BY MISS ANNE C. LYNCH.
A NATION's birthday breaks in glory!
Songs from her hills and valleys rise,
And myriad hearts thrill to the story
Of freedom's wars and victories;
When God's right arm alone was o'er her,
And in her name the patriot band
With sacred blood baptized their land,
And England's lion crouched before her!
Sons of the Emerald Isle !
She bids you rend your chain,
And tell the haughty ocean queen,
Ye, too, are free-born men!
Long has the world looked on in sorrow,
As Erin's sun-burst set in night;
Joy, joy! there breaks a brighter morrow,
Behold a beam of morning light!
A ray of hope her night redeeming ;
And she greets it, though there lower
England's scaffolds, England's Tower,
And though hireling swords are gleaming.
Wild shouts on every breeze
Come swelling o'er the sea,
Hark! 'tis her starving millions cry,
"Give Erin liberty!"
• The ancient flag of Ireland.
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