Before the Curfew | Page 7

all too well?The tale which thus its golden letters tell:
This dust, once breathing, changed its joyous life?For toil and hunger, wounds and mortal strife;?Love, friendship, learning's all prevailing charms,?For the cold bivouac and the clash of arms.?The cause of freedom won, a race enslaved?Called back to manhood, and a nation saved,?These sons of Harvard, falling ere their prime,?Leave their proud memory to the coming time.
While in their still retreats our scholars turn?The mildewed pages of the past, to learn?With endless labor of the sleepless brain?What once has been and ne'er shall be again,?We reap the harvest of their ceaseless toil?And find a fragrance in their midnight oil.?But let a purblind mortal dare the task?The embryo future of itself to ask,?The world reminds him, with a scornful laugh,?That times have changed since Prospero broke his staff.?Could all the wisdom of the schools foretell?The dismal hour when Lisbon shook and fell,?Or name the shuddering night that toppled down?Our sister's pride, beneath whose mural crown?Scarce had the scowl forgot its angry lines,?When earth's blind prisoners fired their fatal mines?
New realms, new worlds, exulting Science claims,?Still the dim future unexplored remains;?Her trembling scales the far-off planet weigh,?Her torturing prisms its elements betray,--?We know what ores the fires of Sirius melt,?What vaporous metals gild Orion's belt;?Angels, archangels, may have yet to learn?Those hidden truths our heaven-taught eyes discern;?Yet vain is Knowledge, with her mystic wand,?To pierce the cloudy screen and read beyond;?Once to the silent stars the fates were known,?To us they tell no secrets but their own.
At Israel's altar still we humbly bow,?But where, oh where, are Israel's prophets now??Where is the sibyl with her hoarded leaves??Where is the charm the weird enchantress weaves??No croaking raven turns the auspex pale,?No reeking altars tell the morrow's tale;?The measured footsteps of the Fates are dumb,?Unseen, unheard, unheralded, they come,?Prophet and priest and all their following fail.?Who then is left to rend the future's veil??Who but the poet, he whose nicer sense?No film can baffle with its slight defence,?Whose finer vision marks the waves that stray,?Felt, but unseen, beyond the violet ray?--?Who, while the storm-wind waits its darkening shroud,?Foretells the tempest ere he sees the cloud,--?Stays not for time his secrets to reveal,?But reads his message ere he breaks the seal.?So Mantua's bard foretold the coming day?Ere Bethlehem's infant in the manger lay;?The promise trusted to a mortal tongue?Found listening ears before the angels sung.?So while his load the creeping pack-horse galled,?While inch by inch the dull canal-boat crawled,?Darwin beheld a Titan from "afar?Drag the slow barge or drive the rapid car,"?That panting giant fed by air and flame,?The mightiest forges task their strength to tame.
Happy the poet! him no tyrant fact?Holds in its clutches to be chained and racked;?Him shall no mouldy document convict,?No stern statistics gravely contradict;?No rival sceptre threats his airy throne;?He rules o'er shadows, but he reigns alone.?Shall I the poet's broad dominion claim?Because you bid me wear his sacred name?For these few moments? Shall I boldly clash?My flint and steel, and by the sudden flash?Read the fair vision which my soul descries?Through the wide pupils of its wondering eyes??List then awhile; the fifty years have sped;?The third full century's opened scroll is spread,?Blank to all eyes save his who dimly sees?The shadowy future told in words like these
How strange the prospect to my sight appears,?Changed by the busy hands of fifty years!?Full well I know our ocean-salted Charles,?Filling and emptying through the sands and marls?That wall his restless stream on either bank,?Not all unlovely when the sedges rank?Lend their coarse veil the sable ooze to hide?That bares its blackness with the ebbing tide.?In other shapes to my illumined eyes?Those ragged margins of our stream arise?Through walls of stone the sparkling waters flow,?In clearer depths the golden sunsets glow,?On purer waves the lamps of midnight gleam,?That silver o'er the unpolluted stream.?Along his shores what stately temples rise,?What spires, what turrets, print the shadowed skies!?Our smiling Mother sees her broad domain?Spread its tall roofs along the western plain;?Those blazoned windows' blushing glories tell?Of grateful hearts that loved her long and well;?Yon gilded dome that glitters in the sun?Was Dives' gift,--alas, his only one!?These buttressed walls enshrine a banker's name,?That hallowed chapel hides a miser's shame;?Their wealth they left,--their memory cannot fade?Though age shall crumble every stone they laid.
Great lord of millions,--let me call thee great,?Since countless servants at thy bidding wait,--?Richesse oblige: no mortal must be blind?To all but self, or look at human kind?Laboring and suffering,--all its want and woe,--?Through sheets of crystal, as a pleasing show?That makes life happier for the chosen few?Duty for whom is something not to do.?When thy last page of life at length is filled,?What shall thine heirs to keep thy memory build??Will piles of stone in Auburn's mournful shade?Save from neglect the spot where thou art laid??Nay,