Classic Poem

Napoleon took Europe and tossed down toppling thrones,
And strewed its ghastly hillsides with white and bleaching bones;
And dandled kings like puppets and made his world-uproar,
And played his battailous music, passed, and was heard no more.

Sam Pasco took a run-down farm, a run-down farm, alas!
Where stretched unbroken solitudes between each spear of grass.
And moss usurped its hillsides and flags usurped its meads,
And both its hills and meadows were a tragedy of weeds.

Sam Pasco's hard campaigning! Long waged the stubborn fray;
And Sam grew bowed and battered, and Sam grew seamed and gray;
But those bald hills grew green with grass, and apple-blossoms fair
Stormed, as with storms of winter, the fragrant summer air.

Napoleon took Europe and played his mighty game,
And sowed its fields with corpses and wrapped its towns in flame.
Sam Pasco took his run-down farm and greened its moss-gray soil,
And one small plat of this wide earth was fairer through his toil.

Sam Pasco and Napoleon! Wide are the midnight skies,
And in the wideness of the worlds men seem of equal size;
And from some star may each look down, each stretch his phantom arm,
Napoleon tow'rd Austerlitz, Sam Pasco tow'rd his farm.