Classic Poem

Beloved friends! More glorious times than ours
Of old existed: men of loftier powers
Then we can boast have flourished: — who shall doubt it?
A million stones dug from the depths of Earth
Will bear this witness for the ancient worth,
If History's chronicles be mute about it.
But, all are gone — those richly-gifted souls —
That constellation of illustrious names:
For Us, for Us, the current moment rolls,
And We, We live, and have our claims.

My friends! The wanderer tells us — and we own —
That Earth shows many a more luxuriant zone
Than that whereunder we sedately live;
But, if denied a paradise, our hearts
Are still the home of science and the arts,
And glow and gladden in the light they give;
And if beneath our skies the laurel pines,
And winter desolates our myrtle boughs,
The curling tendrils of our joyous vines
Shed freshest greenness round our brows.

May burn more feverish life, more maddening pleasures,
Where four assembled worlds exchange their treasures,
At London, in the world's Commercial Hall;
A thousand stately vessels come and go,
And costly sights are there, and pomp and show,
And Gold is lord and idolgod of all!
But will the sun be mirrored in the stream
Sullied and darkened by the flooding rains?
No! On the still smooth lake alone his beam
Is brightly imaged, and remains.

The beggar at St. Angelo's might gaze
With scorn upon our North, for he surveys
The one, lone, only, everliving Rome —
All shapes of beauty fascinate his eye;
He sees a brilliant heaven below the sky
Shine in Saint Peter's wonderwaking dome.
But, even while beaming with celestial glory,
Rome is the grave of long-departed years;
It is the green young plant and not the hoary
And time-worn trunk that blooms and cheers.

Prouder achievements may perchance appear
Elsewhere than signalize our humble sphere,
But newer nowhere underneath the sun.
We see in pettier outlines on our stage,
Which miniatures the world of every age,
The storied feats of bypassed eras done.
All things are but redone, reshown, retold,
Fancy alone is ever young and new;
Man and the universe shall both grow old,
But not the forms her pencil drew!