Classic Poem

Go fight for Freedom, Warriors of the West!
At last the word is spoken: Go!
Lay on for Liberty. 'Twas at her breast
The tyrant aimed his blow;
And ye were wounded with the rest
In Belgium's overthrow.

The anguish of the night is past,
The months of torment, when the roar
Of distant battles rolled against our shore,
Each summons sounding louder than the last;
And in the surge and swell
We heard the deep vibrations of a bell,
The tongue of Fate, that tolling on the blast,
Repeated o'er and o'er
'Awake! your horoscope is cast;
The Old World and the New shall live apart no more.
Awake! the Future claims you. Europe's soul
Hangs in the balance, and the gods contrive
That without her thou never canst be whole,
Nor she without thee save her soul alive.

'Like to the sleeping hero dost thou lie,
Whose father's gear the nymphs beneath a mound
Concealed, while centaurs watched his infancy
Till honor's great occasion should be found.
Awake! the virgins perish, monsters rage;
The earth is mastered by Hell's Overlord;
Accept the manhood of thine heritage:
Behold the shield, the sandals and the sword.'

The dying thunder of the ocean's voice
Left music on the air. The sleeper stirred,
As one who in a dream must make a choice
Of pleasure mixed with pain.
Something he muttered like a broken word;
Then heaved his length and seemed to sleep again.
And still the awful weight of that recurrent sound
Smote on our shores and seemed to shake the ground.

So long, before our lips, fate held the cup, —
So long we waited for the dawn, —
We scarcely breathed or dared look up
For fear that draught of life should be withdrawn.
Vain fears! the stars that shined upon our birth
Had made us freedom's champions on the earth.
Thanks be to God, our page of history
Flashes with all one lightning; one design
From first to last appears in every line,
Which, being noted, makes the tale divine,
But being missed or slighted, all becomes
A meaningless and aimless revery, —
A tale of moving mobs and swords and drums,
A maze without a key, —
A history of pebbles which the sea
Disturbs and rearranges endlessly.

Time was, the world a vision saw.
A faith was born in nations far away
From whom our life and mind we draw, —
A hope, as when the earliest ray
Of peeping dawn predicts the day.
The ancient peoples of the time-worn earth
Divined the meaning of our birth
Before our life began:
The Vision was America,
The Faith was faith in man.
Thus, when our fathers crossed the sea
To found a state that should become
The Capitol of Liberty,
And Freedom's home,
The hopes of Europe with them came,
And in the new republic's name

Pæans were chanted, garlands hung;
The Old World praised the great event,
And blessed the untrodden continent
That should a shrine provide,
Where mercy, justice, strength and truth,
In new-found and immortal youth
Forever should abide.
America became a myth
That Europe's wise-men conjured with,
And prayers went up in many a tongue,
And seers dreamed, and poets sung
And sages prophesied.
And lo, before the echoes died
Of that great pæan, there arose
A state that to the dream replied,
And gave the saints repose.

Thanks be to God who chose of old
The masters of our race,
And stamped an image on the mold
Which time cannot efface.
As if to show what Nature can, —
When, teeming in expansive ease
She overbrims her earlier plan,
Outbursts all ancient boundaries
Of farm and kingdom, race and creed, —
Creation gave the world a man
To meet the larger need.
Nor came he unto us alone,
The world's new hero, Washington.

Him did those opening thunders call
That smite our shores with grinding power;
His name was in the crash and fall
Of every Belgian tower.
By bloody pool, by reeking wall,
'Mid countless deeds of dark offence,
That name went up with every cry
Of prostrate innocence.
For when Incarnate Tyranny
Streamed over lovely France,
And homesteads, roofless to the sky,
Looked up to God askance,

His tattered portrait shared the doom
Of holy pictures in the gloom
Of each abandoned peasant home.
Here by the lowliest hearths of earth,
While generations came and went,
His face had shone o'er death and birth,
And mingled with the hopes and fears, —
The household words, the merriment, the tears, —
The deep religious sentiment
That tells men God doth not forget.
So burned he, and his lamp is burning yet.

Ah France, thou art the home of Memory,
The Mother of the Muses! In thy hands
The Past is safe: each peasant holds a key
To archives which the savant understands,
And all conspire to guard a treasury,
Where flock the enthusiasts of other lands
To dip their minds in thee.
France, France herself doth not forget!
So mused I, — wondering what we,
The lost tribe of the new world, had to set
Against such piety.
Have we no saints? Within our atrium stands
No altar to the great of other lands?

And, as I question, there appears, —
An image, — pictures, statues, prints.
The earliest memories of my earliest years
Are filled with lithographs and mezzotints
That on each wall and stair and stoop were met.
Ay, let France search our homes! She'll find
In many a manse, in many a nook
In every old-time picture book,
In every pious and ingenuous mind, —
In simple folk of the ancestral kind, —
The shade of Lafayette.

Another name, a sacred name there is, —
A nature more than human, a great mind, —
Less like to Cæsar than to Socrates,
Which on our native roster ye shall find.
'Twas liberty that gave him to mankind;

And as her soldier fell he, to the last
Drawing from her the light by which he shined,
And knitting up his legend with the past.
Subdued to contemplation's wand
He set his compass by a star
And pondered ever the beyond
That lay behind the veils of war.
The Fate of Man, the mystic aim,
The unimaginable end,
Floats like an angel in the flame
Of every word he spoke or penned.
While the dictator's robe he wore
He was the poet of the poor.

Not unto us alone came he,
This prophet of humanity.
His was that fight at dawn that left us free
To meet the issue of these darker days.
Then too we battled for posterity.
And had we lost, the world to-day could raise
Its head no longer. Thus doth God appraise
So carefully the weights in either scale
That every ounce must count to make the truth prevail.

Such are our beacons; near them stand
A lesser yet illumined band,
Who of the self-same springs have drunk,
And through whose minds the stream has sunk
To water all the land.
The old heroic creed is taught
In every hamlet, grange and town,
And children lisp the giant thought
Of Franklin and of Hamilton.
The young were never steeped before
So deep in governmental lore.

What wonder that each shining rank
Of martial striplings takes its way
Handsome as Hermes, and as frank
As lads upon a holiday!
Think ye they do not understand
The mighty thing they have in hand? —
'Tis the religion of their land.

And when that bell-like thunder-sound
Crashed on our shores and cried, Awake!
Thought ye no answering lightning should be found?
Behold the answer! Look around.
Yea, and our winds to Europe take
Not soldiers merely — but the mind,
The deathless part that doth consist
In our soul's message, — the debate
Of life with death and love with hate,
Framed by our great protagonist
To documents of state.
They speak our spirit; for he knew
The magic horn to wind
Of Lincoln and of Washington: he drew
As clear a note as ever trumpet blew,
While round the world the music flew
That unified mankind.

Go, Western Warriors! Take the place
The ages have assigned you in a strife
Which to have died in were enough of life;
For you there waits a quest
Such as no paladin or hero knew
Of all who lifted sword or wielded mace
Since George the Dragon slew;
For you a sacramental feast
Too rich, too happy, too fulfilled
Of all that man e'er craved or God hath willed,
Too blessèd to be offered save to you.