TO THE PAST. WONDROUS and awful are thy silent halls, There lie the bygone ages in their palls, Guarded by shadows vast, There all is hushed and breathless, Save when some image of old error falls Earth worshipped once as deathless. There sits drear Egypt, 'mid beleaguering sands, Half woman and half beast, The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands That once lit all the East; A dotard bleared and hoary, There Asser crouches o'er the blackened brands Of Asia's long-quenched glory. Still as a city buried 'neath the sea Idle as forms on wind-waved tapestry Thy phantasms grope and shiver, Or watch the loose shores crumbling silently Into Time's gnawing river. Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun, Of their old godhead lorn, Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun, Which they misdeem for morn; And yet the eternal sorrow In their unmonarched eyes says day is done O realm of silence and of swart eclipse, The shapes that haunt thy gloom Make signs to us and move their withered lips Across the gulf of doom; Yet all their sound and motion Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of ships. On the mirage's ocean. And if sometimes a moaning wandereth From out thy desolate halls, If some grim shadow of thy living death Across our sunshine falls And scares the world to error, The eternal life sends forth melodious breath To chase the misty terror. Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world-noised deeds Are silent now in dust, Gone like a tremble of the huddling reeds Beneath some sudden gust; Thy forms and creeds have vanished, Tossed out to wither like unsightly weeds From the world's garden banished. Whatever of true life there was in thee Leaps in our age's veins; Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery, And shake thine idle chains; To thee thy dross is clinging, For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see, Thy poets still are singing. Here, 'mid the bleak waves of our strife and care, Float the green Fortunate Isles Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share Our martyrdoms and toils; The present moves attended With all of brave and excellent and fair That made the old time splendid. TO THE FUTURE. O LAND of Promise! from what Pisgah's height Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers ? Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold Still brightening abysses, And blazing precipices, Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven, Sometimes a glimpse is given Of thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted blisses. |