Classic Poem

'Twas the marble crypt where the Emperor lay,
His mighty marshals on either side,
Guarding his couch since the solemn day
France brought him home in her chastened pride,
To sleep on her heart, from the sea-girt cage
Where the Eagle pined and died in his rage.

I thought of the long, red carnival
Death held in the track of his sword, amain,
From Toulon's bloom to the crimsoned pall
He spread upon Waterloo's ripened grain;
I thought of the long black years of dread
When the nations quaked at his armies' tread.

A-sudden above as the twilight fell
The deathly silence around was shocked
By the roll of a drum. At the throbbing swell
The vaulted dome of the Heavens rocked,
Till it seemed that the mighty conqueror's soul
Was shaking the earth in that drum's long roll.

In the purple glooming the spell was wrought;
And forth from their tomb the legions sprang:
A Cadmus-brood of a Master's thought;
The long-roll beat and the bugles sang:
The tattered standards again unfurled,
And Napoleon once more bestrid the world.

I heard that instant the self-same drum
Which beat at his call when France arose
From her ashes and blood when he bade her come
In Liberty's name to face her foes;
I saw her invincible armies arise,
The light of Liberty in their eyes.

O'er Tyranny's pyre her standards flew;
I felt the thrill of the new-born life:
As cleansed from Terror, France the true,
Sprang forth rejoicing amid the strife,
As a woman rejoiceth travail-torn
At the living voice of her own first-born.

From the ruddy morning on Egypt's sands,
When her eagles rose in their terrible flight
To stretch their shadow across the lands
Till it perished in Russia's frozen night,
When th' insatiable conqueror's reckoning came
And his Empire melted away in flame:

When there at Moscow the Lord God spoke
And said, " Thine end is at hand: prepare, "
As at Kadesh once, from amid the smoke,
To the prophet who led His People there;
" I set thee up, I will cast thee down,
For that thou claimedst thyself the crown.

" Thine eyes have seen; but thou shalt not stand
On the promised shore of a world set free;
The People shall pass alone to the Land
Of Promise and Light and Liberty:
Of Peace enthroned in a Nation's trust,
When thou and thy throne alike are dust. "