Ode

NOT on slight errands come the Immortals;
Loud the alarum; they burst the portals,
Bringing new ages,
Saints, poets, sages;
They rend, they trample;
Their power is ample
To do great deeds and tasks unshared,
That only the single soul has ever dared.
In them, and what they can,
Is the greatness of man.

O City, set amid the bloom and brine
Of bowery summer by her Northern seas,
Sweet is thy azure morn, thy blowing breeze;
But deeplier our lives with thee entwine;
And as young children at their mother’s knees
Gaze on her face, such loveliness is thine;
For half their eyes behold, and half their hearts divine,
And their dropt lids adore the unseen throne;
So has our boyhood known
The heavenly glory felt in greatness gone
That in its native fields long lingers on:
Blest feet that walked thy ancient ways,
And edged with light thy morning days;
Forms that along thy ice-bound shore
The sword and lamp in each hand bore;
Who build one age, and hew the next,
While Freedom hoards each gospel text.
Through lowly lives the frugal centuries roll
And each rude cradle holds a child of God;
Long generations nurse the new-born soul,
And show the shining track the Saviour trod.
So from that first and famous race
Who smote the rock whence poured this stream of years,
Came forth the bloom of prayer and flower of grace
Whose incense sweeter in the sons appears.

O Mother-state, white with departing May,
A hundred Mays depart; this beauty aye
Streams from thy breasts, a thousand children owning
Whose lives are made the scriptures of thy youth,
And foremost he, whose prophet voice intoning
With pointing finger read God’s primal truth.
From sire to son was stored the sacred seed;
Age piled on age to meet a nation’s need;
Till the high natal hour,
Rounding to perfect power,
On climbing centuries borne,
Found genius’ height sublime,
And set a star upon the front of time,
That spreads, as far as sunset flames, thy spiritual morn.

O boon, all other gifts above
That loads our veins with power, with love,
Joyful is birth wherever mothers are,
Since over Bethlehem stood the children’s star!
Ever by that transcendent sign
The budding boy is born divine;
Infinity into his being flows
As if all nature flowered in one rose;
A million blooms suffuse the fragrant hills,
And, look! a manhood race our emerald valleys fills!

I see great cities stand,
Mothers of equal men,
Each leading by the hand
A multitude immense, sweet to command,
Her clinging broods; the tool, the book, the pen,
Letters and arts whereby a man may live,
To each child she doth give,
And with fraternity she binds all fast,
Honoring the spark of God; she cherisheth
The mighty flame to be her blood and breath,
And her immortal pinion over death;
For as these little ones shall fare, her fates are cast.

A manhood race! we are not children now,
Fronting the fates with knit imperial brow,—
Lords over Nature; fast her mystic reign
Fades in the finer mystery of the brain,
That now with intellect and will informs
Her clashing atoms and her wandering storms;
Deep in the sphere the mighty magic plies;
Darkness has fled from matter; from the skies
Space has departed; the invisible
Pestilence shivers in life’s ultimate cell;
While continents divide like Egypt’s sea,
And the still ocean-floors wonder what thought may be.
And better in the human strife
We labor blest, the lords of life,
Blending the many-nationed race
Where God through all mankind has poured the torrent of His grace.
Bright in our midst His Mercy-seat
Throngs with innumerable feet;
Nor hath He made their multitude complete;
And where the human storm terrific rears
Above the flying land,
One word the throne of heaven hears
That all tongues understand:
America, they whisper low
As down through flame and blood they go
To the pale ocean strand;
Nor once, nor twice, this rising coast appears
Beneath its heaven-streaming torch illumed,
Man’s ark of safety on the flood of years;
There have we clothed them naked, and there fed
On Freedom’s loaf, whose blessed bread,
Forever multiplied and unconsumed,
As if the Master’s voice still in it spoke
Our hands have to uncounted millions broke;
There have we wiped away a whole world’s tears.
Wide as the gates of life, let stand our gates,
Nor them deny whom God denied not birth;
Nor, though we house all outcasts of the earth,
Christ being within our city, fear the fates!

O birthright found the sweetest
That in our blood began!
O manhood-faith found fleetest
Of all the faiths of man!
We own the one great Mother
Who first the man-child bore,
And every man a brother
Who wears the form Christ wore.
Such mighty voices murmured round our youth,
Souls dedicated to immortal toil;
And, battle-bound, the fiery wings of truth
Sublime swept past us o’er the sacred soil;
So loud a morn was to our childhood given,
And mixed with flashes out of heaven
Pealing words our spirits shook,
And awful forms with superhuman look, —
Our cradle-truths; so native to our lips,
That like our mother tongue their thunder slips;
We have no memory when it was not so.
Wherefore we fear not, coming to our own;
Men are we, greatness that our sons shall know
Who us inherit; now we wield alone
The glory; for the mighty ones lie low;
They are dead, brain and hand; they are dust, blood and bone.

I lay the singing laurel down
Upon the silent grave;
’T is vain; the master slumbers on
Nor knows the gift he gave.
I take again the murmuring crown
Whose life is here and now;
And every leaf sings Emerson;
His music binds my brow.
For in this changeful mortal scene,
Where all things mourn what once has been,
Only the touch of soul with soul
At last escapes from death’s control:
And from himself I learnt it, — the true singer
Of his own heavens must be the bright star-bringer,
And sphere of dawning lights his morning song;
So shall his music to God’s time belong,
Not to an age, thus did his orb,
Though dark with earth, the eternal ray absorb
And bright renew; he heard the wind-harp’s strings,
The cosmic pulse, the chemic dance,
And saw through spirit-mating things
Man’s secular advance.
The song the sons of morning sang
He found on Nature’s lyre,
And carols that angelic rang,
Within the heart’s desire;
Thence he drew with burning palms
Hymns and far millennial psalms;
And, high o’er all, one strain no dark could daunt,
With notes sublimely dominant,
Sang victory, victory, victory unto man
In whose fair soul victorious good began;
The vision beautiful,
The labor dutiful,
Truth, the finder,
Love, the binder;
And close about our mortal tasks the sacred faces came,
Sweet faces pale beside our paler flame.
He fed our souls with holy dew,
Yet taught us by the line to hew,
Shaping here the type ideal
Our farthest years shall bright reveal
In millions multiplied,
Who shall swarm the green land o’er,
The snow-clad and the golden shore,
And dwell with beauty, side by side;
A type to witness what the spirit can
Amid its daily tasks,
Even such a one as the pure gospel asks,
The bravest lover of his kind, the man American.

And thou, O Fountain, whence we issued forth,
Source of all kindly grace and noble worth,
Who in our fathers poured so wide a flood,
Leave not our temples, fail not from our blood;
Even this that doth along my pulses fleet
From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet,
With all the American years made sweet,
The sweetest blood that flows!
Make us to dwell secure where tempests are,
And find in peace the mightiest arm of war;
And if, past justice’ bound, our foes increase,
Make war the harbinger of larger peace;
So in us shall the higher be found
With palm and olive, equal trophies, crowned.
Last for the soul make we our great appeal;
There foster and confirm thy own ideal;
Grant us self-conquest and self-sacrifice,
Since only upon these may virtue rise.