The tolling of a midnight chime!
The Hour strikes on the bell of time;
Another year is dead!
From the dark gulf the vapors climb
Slowly, to bury shame and crime,
Unnumbered woes, uncounted joys,
The Old Year’s hollow pomp and noise,
The glory and the dread!
Let the cold winds his requiem sing,
The naked forest wail, and wring
Its skeleton hands for woe;
Let human hearts their burdens bring,
Upon his frosty bier to fling,
That Life may march with lighter feet,
When folded in his winding sheet
Their sorrows sink below.
See, as the Lethean vapors rise, –
A grey screen on the midnight skies,
With conflagration red, –
How moves the pictured Past, in guise
Of spectral life, with lurid dyes,
The shapes that filed the vanished year,
The mingled horror, hope, and fear,
The glory and the dread!
Across an Ocean’s dim expanse,
See, leaning on her broken lance,
A nation pale and stern, –
Torn, bleeding, but unsullied France,
The old fire in her eagle glance,
With Freedom’s smouldering ashes hot
Upon her altar’s sacred spot,
That yet shall flash and burn!
Beyond, an Empire proud and strong,
Who made her very justice wrong,
Half sheathes a vengeful brand;
Her children shout their glad Rhine-Song,
The dream fulfilled they nursed so long, –
Forgetting in their wild refrain
How Glory’s purple hides the chain
That binds their Fatherland!
Here, throned upon her mountains’ crest,
The grand Republic of the West
Has married sea to sea;
And fast upon her heaving breast
Her battle-scars are over-laced
With golden Plenty; and the shriek
Of her free eagle’s guardian beak
Gives peace to millions free!
But ha! across the vapory screen
What shapes of lurid woe are seen!
What spectral horrors crowd!
There are storm and wreck, the ghastly green
Of angry seas, – and torn between
The jagged jaws of crag and cliff,
The great ship splintered like a skiff,
The dead without a shroud!
Here, bursting lava-like, from check,
The hot steam hurls the rending deck.
With crowded lives death-sped;
A thousand throbbing fragments fleck
The sanguine waters, and the wreck –
Dark monument of human greed –
Through tangled hair and nerve and weed
Drifts mournfully with the dead!
There, roaring down the hollow dark,
With swarms of happy hearts for mark,
The engine’s blazing bomb
Goes crash, across the red lamp’s spark! –
And lanterns gleam on corses stark,
Where friend and brother, bride and groom,
Were lapsed in light from fear and gloom, –
Now shattered, pale and dumb,
Adown the subterranean glooms
Where toilers hew their living tombs
A livid fire-burst shines;
Hemmed in with unimagined dooms
They struggle and sink, while Flame consumes
The lifeless air, or chars the flesh
That grappled bravely, for the fresh,
The red fiend of the mines.
Still redder glows the midnight path
The prairies to the forest call
With myriad tongues of fire;
The forests answer as they fall,
With flaming lips devouring all;
The father and his frantic flock,
Seeking cool wave or sheltering rock
In treacherous flames expire.
Redder and redder flares the crest
Of Ruin over all the West
For very wrath sublime;
Ten thousand homes with luxury blest
He swathes within his flaming vest;
The golden City, the proud Queen
Who sat amid her towers, serene,
Sits black in ashy grime.
O, sweetly now, the misty screen
Folds in the horrors of the scene:
And, bathed in sunset’s glow,
The golden City, the fair Queen,
Watches her rising towers, serene
In renovated beauty, sprung
From her black ashes, strong and young,
As ere that night of woe.
The pulses of the common heart
Have poured their strength to every part
Where fell the reddening scourge;
Far nations heard, with sudden start
And showered the wealth of field and mart;
A million hands were stretched to save,
A million homes their treasures gave,
With only love to urge.
Go down, Old Year! that smoky cloud
May fold thee in its mantling shroud,
Upon thy frosty bier!
Diviner hopes our bosoms crowd,
Our hearts are mere divinely proud,
For the deep strength of human good,
And hail for human Brotherhood
A Happy, glad, New Year!
George Shepard Burleigh
