Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,

When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro;

At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing

start,

Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips

apart,

And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart.

So the Evil's triumph sendeth, with a terror and a

chill,

Under continent to continent, the sense of coming

ill,

And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God

In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by

the sod,

Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the

nobler clod.

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears

along,

Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of right

or wrong;

Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast

frame

Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame ;

In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal

claim.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to

decide,

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or

evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,

Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon

the right,

And the choice goes by for ever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou

shalt stand,

Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?

Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 't is Truth alone

is strong,

And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her

throng

Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all

wrong.

Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments

see,

That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through

Oblivion's sea;

Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding

cry

Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose

feet earth's chaff must fly;

Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but

record

One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;

Truth for ever on the scaffold, Wrong for ever on the

throne,—

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is

great,

Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm

of fate,

But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's

din,

List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave

within,

"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."

Slavery, the earthborn Cyclops, fellest of the giant

brood,

Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,

Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer

day,

Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable

prey;

Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her

wretched crust,

Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosper

ous to be just;

Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward

stands aside,

Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is cruci

fied,

And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had

denied.