Chant your loud peans, weave your civic crown;
But know, the goddess you’ve so long adored,
Though now she scabbards your avenging sword,
Calls you to vigilance, to manlier cares,
To prove in peace the men she proved in wars:
Superior task! severer test of soul!
’Tis here bold virtue plays her noblest role
And merits most of praise. The warrior’s name,
Though peal’d and chimed on all the tongues of fame,
Sounds less harmonious to the grateful mind
Than his who fashions and improves mankind.
And what high meed your new vocation waits!
Freedom, parturient with a hundred states,
Confides them to your hand; the nascent prize
Claims all your care, your soundest wisdom tries.
Ah nurture, temper, train your infant charge,
Its force develop and its life enlarge,
Unfold each day some adolescent grace,
Some right recognise or some duty trace;
Mold a fair model for the realms of earth,
Call moral nature to a second birth,
Reach, renovate the world’s great social plan
And here commence the sober sense of man.
For lo in other climes and elder states
What strange inversion all his works awaits!
From age to age, on every peopled shore,
Stalks the fell Demon of despotic power,
Sweeps in his march the mounds of art away,
Blots with his breath the trembling disk of day,
Treads down whole nations every stride he takes
And wraps their labors in his fiery flakes.
As Anarch erst around his regions hurl’d
The wrecks, long crusht of time’s anterior world;
While nature mourn’d, in wild confusion tost,
Her suns extinguisht and her systems lost,
Light, life and instinct shared the dreary trance,
And gravitation fled the field of chance;
No laws remain’d of matter, motion, space;
Time lost his count, the universe his place;
Till Order came, in her cerulean robes
And launcht and rein’d the renovated globes,
Stockt with harmonious worlds the vast Inane,
Archt her new heaven and fixt her boundless reign:
So kings convulse the moral frame, the base
Of all the codes that can accord the race;
And so from their broad grasp, their deadly ban,
’Tis yours to snatch this earth, to raise regenerate man.
My friends, I love your fame; I joy to raise
The high toned anthem of my country’s praise;
To sing her victories, virtues, wisdom, weal,
Boast with loud voice the patriot pride I feel;
Warm wild I sing; and, to her failings blind,
Mislead myself, perhaps mislead mankind.
Land that I love! is this the whole we owe?
Thy pride to pamper, thy fair face to show;
Dwells there no blemish where such glories shine?
And lurks no spot in that bright sun of thine?
Hark! a dread voice, with heaven-astounding strain,
Swells like a thousand thunders o’er the main,
Rolls and reverberates around thy hills,
And Hesper’s heart with pangs paternal fills.
Thou hearst him not; ’tis Atlas, throned sublime,
Great brother guardian of old Afric’s clime;
High o’er his coast he rears his frowning form,
O’erlooks and calms his sky-borne fields of storm,
Flings off the clouds that round his shoulders hung
And breaks from clogs of ice his trembling tongue;
While far through space with rage and grief he glares,
Heaves his hoar head and shakes the heaven he bears:
—Son of my sire! O latest brightest birth
That sprang from his fair spouse, prolific earth!
Great Hesper, say what sordid ceaseless hate
Impels thee thus to mar my elder state?
Our sire assign’d thee thy more glorious reign,
Secured and bounded by our laboring main;
That main (though still my birthright name it bear)
Thy sails o’ershadow, thy brave children share;
I grant it thus; while air surrounds the ball,
Let breezes blow, let oceans roll for all.
But thy proud sons, a strange ungenerous race,
Enslave my tribes, and each fair world disgrace,
Provoke wide vengeance on their lawless land,
The bolt ill placed in thy forbearing hand.—
Enslave my tribes! then boast their cantons free,
Preach faith and justice, bend the sainted knee,
Invite all men their liberty to share,
Seek public peace, defy the assaults of war,
Plant, reap, consume, enjoy their fearless toil,
Tame their wild floods to fatten still their soil,
Enrich all nations with their nurturing store
And rake with venturous fluke each wondering shore.—
Enslave my tribes! what, half mankind imban,
Then read, expound, enforce the rights of man!
Prove plain and clear how nature’s hand of old
Cast all men equal in her human mold!
Their fibres, feelings, reasoning powers the same,
Like wants await them, like desires inflame.
Through former times with learned book they tread,
Revise past ages and rejudge the dead,
Write, speak, avenge, for ancient sufferings feel,
Impale each tyrant on their pens of steel,
Declare how freemen can a world create,
And slaves and masters ruin every state.—
Enslave my tribes! and think, with dumb disdain,
To scape this arm and prove my vengeance vain!
But look! methinks beneath my foot I ken
A few chain’d things that seem no longer men;
Thy sons perchance! whom Barbary’s coast can tell
The sweets of that loved scourge they wield so well.
Link’d in a line, beneath the driver’s goad,
See how they stagger with their lifted load;
The shoulder’d rock, just wrencht from off my hill
And wet with drops their straining orbs distil,
Galls, grinds them sore, along the rarnpart led,
And the chain clanking counts the steps they tread.
By night close bolted in the bagnio’s gloom,
Think how they ponder on their dreadful doom,
Recall the tender sire, the weeping bride,
The home, far sunder’d by a waste of tide,
Brood all the ties that once endear’d them there,
But now, strung stronger, edge their keen despair.
Till here a fouler fiend arrests their pace:
Plague, with his burning breath and bloated face,
With saffron eyes that through the dungeon shine,
And the black tumors bursting from the groin,
Stalks o’er the slave; who, cowering on the sod,
Shrinks from the Demon and invokes his God,
Sucks hot contagion with his quivering breath
And rackt with rending torture sinks in death.
Nor shall these pangs atone the nation’s crime;
Far heavier vengeance, in the march of time,
Attends them still; if still they dare debase
And hold inthrall’d the millions of my race;
A vengeance that shall shake the world’s deep frame,
That heaven abhors and hell might shrink to name.
Nature, long outraged, delves the crusted sphere
And molds the mining mischief dark and drear;
Europa too the penal shock shall find,
The rude soul-selling monsters of mankind.
Where Alps and Andes at their bases meet,
In earth’s mid caves to lock their granite feet,
Heave their broad spines, expand each breathing lobe
And with their massy members rib the globe,
Her cauldron’d floods of fire their
