Old Poets singing to their lyres of gold,
True golden Epics, in an iron age,
Have made their heroes. God above made mine —
A living canticle of power and peace:
And I have spoken to you not in vain,
My countrymen! if here I have not marr'd
His better singing; striving as I may
To interpret, in the words of human song,
That burning Epos.
If my birchen torch —
The simple lamp of hands inured to toil,
Have caught one sparkle from the SIGNAL FIRES
That blaze along a Hero's mountain march,
So kindling with their glory that some eyes.
Led by the nearer twinkle, turn to read
The unborrowed brightness, and forget the lamp
That flared their lids up — it is not in vain
That, for one new moon's rounding, I lay down
The sickle for the signal, the keen scythe
For the rude cythern — for it seems, again.
That miracle of the ages — a True Man,
Has risen among us — one in whose large soul
Hero and Human Brother have struck hands.
And Worth and Worship mingle sisterly.
Then only, when the world has need of him,
God sends the Hero, and his stature marks
The measure of his mission; for, what means
This, which we crown as Hero, but the sum
And concentration of a People's need,
Fed grandly, to repletion of its wants —
The incarnate answer of a people's prayer,
Performing God's high purpose?
Show the Man,
Towering preeminent above his peers,
And we have witness of a giant work —
The clear prediction of what Heaven intends
In this Man's generation.
Show the Work,
The vast necessities of Humanity —
Some hideous monster of the moral world
To be scourged out, and driven back to hell —
Some wrong's dark inroad upon human rights
To be repelled— or a wide continent
Of primal Chaos, waiting for the hand
Of a great conqueror to subdue its wilds
To the broad reign of Order — and for each
Ripe need, the Heavens have ripened the right Man,
Him choose, sustain, and help, or the ripe need
Grows rotten ripe, and the uplifted Arm
Of Benediction falls in judgment wrath!
This Land has uttered the prophetic moan
Of its great want, heard faintly through the shout
Of boastful clamors, and the noisy whirl
Of its sublime activities, too long —
Whole decades long, while parasite Misrule
Grew fat upon her vitals. She has cast
The name of God, and the diviner Law,
Out of her councils ; for the wicked rule,
And Mammon sits with Anarchy and Crime,
In her high places — and the people mourn.
One cloud has deepened its broad thunder-folds,
From a small handbreath to a mountain mass,
Behind whose volumed blackness the faint light
Has struggled long and fitfully; but the Man
Came not, to answer the mute questioning
Of pained hearts, whether in the lurid sky
Dawned the new day of Liberty and Peace,
Or garnered lightnings fluttered their red wings,
Precursive, for the last destroying swoop!
When the night gathered, and the perilous fire
Stooped imminent, the need produced its Man.
Then rose our martyrs whom the world knows not,
Whose names have been a hissing in the Land,
The moral champions of outraged Right,
Whose names shall be a glory in the Land;
Their great, indignant hearts, with fiery beat,
Hurled renovating pulses through the veins
Of the sin-fevered and sin-torpid mass,
Till the Land's hunger-cry becomes a shout
That will not hush till Freedom's right shall reign.
Perjured, and stained with every crime — itself
The crowning crime of crimes — dark Slavery
Has rolled her turbid waters, wave on wave,
Over the smiling South-Land, laying waste
Her Eden gardens, till the wolves come back
And howl among her desolated homes!
New lands, new victims, and new devotees
Must fall before her, feeding, still in vain,
Her still insatiate famine, till, forsworn
The oaths she took in solemn covenant —
Which, our deep sin in making, bates no jot
Of her deep perjury in forswearing — she
Leaps her Missouri bound, as lightly as fire,
Cruel as death, and false as nether hell,
And holds young Kansas by her bleeding throat!
Now by the Throne, and Him who sits thereon!
And by our Souls, we swear, weighing our words
With finest scruples, swear, that the black fiend,
Shall lose her clutch from that fair Sufferer,
And print no track of her polluted foot
On God's free soil, our heritage, again, —
Or perish where she stands!
This, if I read
The indignation of free hearts aright,
Is their deep vow and purpose, this the work,
One task of many worthy, which demands
\And prophesies the Coming Man, once more.
Let not the word-strong moralist, whose words
Have sent true pulses through these working souls,
Debar their working. It is theirs to braid
Organic lightning, from his moral light
Whose limbless flame may spread diffusive life,
In broad unbolted flashes, but has need
Of the Strong Arm to work its fiery will
Upon one purpose — needs the pointed steel
Of sword-armed Themis, or the dreader edge
— By Duty called and Freedom sanctified —
Of red Bellona, to call down its fire
In triple bolts on hoar Iniquity.
The imperative need its index finger lifts.
Pointing aloft, to mark the magnitude
Of Heaven's Elect, the stature of his soul.
Amid the ripening of the mighty Want,
We turn to ask, where ripens the right Man ?
And find him, tracked by all his glowing deeds,
— A great life's-labor for his pupilage —
Still learning right Rule in God's Normal School,
The wilderness and mountain, where of old
The peerless renovators of the world
Took their stern lessons.
He, through giant toils
And more gigantic perils, set his name
Upon the everlasting mountain-tops,
And made the desert vocal with his praise.
In the wide waste of trackless wilderness,
He asked the silent stars above his head, [him ;
“Whither ? and where?" and the stars answered
High on the snow-capp'd mountain, whose abyss
No line and plummet sounded, he inquired
Of the thin Air, and the thin Air replied,
"Thus far, oh, soul-winged Eagle! thou hast soared
In the high places of the Universe."
He bade the homeless wilds to give him meat,
And the wilds fed him, and the river-springs
Brought water to him in the lonely place,
Till all the wilds grew famished and athirst,
And Hunger walked the dreary blank with him !
The virgin Realms that slept in solitude,
Or only woke to the wild whoop of men
Fiercer than wolves — fair Realms as beautiful
As Tirzah of the Hills, and terrible
As the ranked squadrons of a bannered army!—
His hand, to the swart hand of Labor, gave,
As a young Bride adorned for her espousals.
The Golden Gate of the new Ophir rolled
Unjarring on its hinges to let in
Our swarming vigor, at his magic word,
The "open sesame" of his fiery valor:
And that vast hollow in the giant hand
Of our world-beckoning Continent, where now
The fleshly Saints build up their Canaan —
With all its grandeur of eternal hills,
And beauty of green meadows, and that deep
Where the sad billows of the Inland Sea,
Salt as the grave, break on the Utah rocks,
And whiten their dark bases — first to him
Unveiled the secrets of its lonely depths.
And changed wild Fable into wondrous Fact.
When the grim Lion of the Isles came down
Warily creeping from his northern lair—
Where sat the jeweled Princess of the West,
Leaned on her white Nevada's ermined arms —
Or chained, or charmed, upon her virginal hills,
With old Pacific moaning at her feet,
By chance the keen eye of the voyager saw
The unsheathing claws, his quick ear heard the purr,
Prelusive to the leap — and his quick hand
Snapped the corroded fetter, and set free
Her "Beauty" from the spoiler, and the "Beast."
The baffled Jesuit, and the lynx-eyed Spy,
And the false Leader of a cruel band,
Muttered vain curses on their swift defeat.
The foe, far off in their delightful dreams,
But near at hand, with his mysterious Glass
Reading their horoscope— from studious toil
Leapt up, full armed, and snatched the glowing prize!
There Science put on valor, and the Stars
Fought against Sisera!
For his swift success,
Where to have lingered had been final loss,
This Nation, jealous of her Ocean Sire —
By all she hopes for in her proud expanse,
By all she won in that victorious Ride,
Owes to this Man her dearest gratitude.
Humanity no less, in that broad land
Stands debtor to him for a good work done.
When other hands were forging darker chains
For the fair Captive, his shook off the bolts,
And, by his voice in Freedom's trial hour,
Her Golden Hills were rescued from the clank
Of Slavery's chain, the snap of Slavery's whip;
And unborn millions shall rise up in joy,
To call him Blessed as they call him Great.
His life has gone up to its regal seat,
Beyond the reign of failure and mischance —
Even in this pupilage for a vaster work,
Complete in greatness of a task well done.
We call him to that work, for our Land's Good,
Nor offer laurels greener than his own.
The idolatrous peoples have bowed down before
The Golden Calf of Commerce — bent so low,
They see not the dark stains of human blood
Upon its horrid altar, and forget
The living God of justice and of truth.
We call our Leader from his Sinai peaks,
To bring the Law; not less the Eternal Code,
Than that grave record, read in fathom snows,
When the whole mountain smoked, and every beast
That touched it died! — we call him, so to advance
To him one little of the mighty debt
We owe the Future, and the Future him.
Her myriad voices, and imploring hands,
Far-seen in clear prevision, supplicate
By all she may be, or may fail to be,
That we be faithful in this fearful hour,
And do that justice to a people's hope,
That mercy to the peeled and trodden down,
Which is but lovelier justice — laid on us
By solemn mortmain of the immortal dead,
By the stern crisis of the eventful Now,
And all the periled Future in our hands!
We call the Leader gladly, for we know
The startling summons can not be in vain,
Whatever fate or favor, frowns or smiles.
The millions gather round his glowing page,
And catch some inspiration from his fire.
His stirring Name, heard far away before,
Is not an echo, but a pealing shout —
A Power among our jubilating hills —
A Sunrise on our plains and valley-paths.
The very coward, though he shrink and quake
At the dim story of his daring march,
Will feel some flutter of exulting blood,
Tending to nobler manhood, evermore,
To see the Hero trampling down despair,
And treading firmly to sublime Success,
Where the tough brute reeled stiffly back, and died,
And the hard savage dare not follow him !
This age, among her manifold wealths and wants,
Had need of him, to scourge the craven blood
Of men, grown paltering hucksters, or sleek-combed
Young foplings, toying with a lady's fan,
In perfumed parlors — to some dash of health
And manly hardihood, which alone make stuff
For manly souls, and brains for manly thought.
The stern, unmeant rebuke of his great life,
Stings idle natures lapped in moneyed ease,
And plucking the ripe fruits of honor's tree
From boughs bent to them — like a goading whip
In a strong hand, till latent nobleness
Leaps to the cheek, and lights the hopeful flush
Of mingled shame and better purposes —
Or all the innate dastard stands confest,
In plotting envy and a powerless rage.
This life were worthy of its great renown
If, ending here, it lent no richer fruit
Than its high lessons for the young and brave —
Of modest worth and golden temperance,
Heart's purity, and reverential soul —
For strong oppression an instinctive hate —
A natural sympathy for wronged and weak —
Crowning intrepid valor, and firm will,
And a wise mind, that shakes familiarly
The hand of Nature in her secretest home.
But even exuberant Fancy were too poor
To tell its vast beneficence of worth
To that Grand Future he has served so well,
When the swift tides of human life have rolled
Their endless billows over all the West —
Now o'er the Rocky Mountains leaping white —
Now o'er the steep Nevada, to the sea;
From where St. Helen lifts her fiery horn,
And hoary Hood flings back on Oregon
The sunrise gold, from his eternal snows,
To the Sierras of the utmost South,
That guard the Land of Gold — his memory
Shall flourish greener than their viny slopes,
And purer than their never-trodden peaks.
The endless harp-strings of the captive Zeus,
— Old thunder-god forlorner, at his task,
Than Saturn in his exile — pining out
His lightning soul upon the tremulous wire,
Shall whisper in one breath, from sea to sea
The Name we blazon on our banner-fields;
And the chained dragon of the flying car,
Rousing the echoes with a thunder tramp,
From bald Katahdin to St. Francis' Bay,
Will give it with a shriek to all the hills;
And mount to mount shall toss our banner-cry,
"FREE MEN, FREE SOIL, FREMONT, and VICTORY!"
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