When I awoke, hell burned within my brain,
Which staggered on its seat; for all around
The mouldering relics of my kindred lay,
Even as the Almighty's ire arrested them,—
And in their various attitudes of death
My murdered children's mute and eyeless skulls
Glared ghastlily upon me.
But my soul,
From sight and sense of the polluting woe
Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer
Hell's freedom to the servitude of heaven.
Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began
My lonely and unending pilgrimage;
Resolved to wage unweariable war
With my almighty tyrant, and to hurl
Defiance at his impotence to harm
Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand
That barred my passage to the peaceful grave
Has crushed the earth to misery, and given
Its empire to the chosen of his slaves.
These have I seen, even from the earliest dawn
Of weak, unstable, and precarious power,
Then preaching peace, as now they practise war;
So, when they turned but from the massacre
Of unoffending infidels, to quench
Their thirst for ruin in the very blood
That flowed in their own veins,- and pitiless zeal Froze every human feeling, as the wife Sheathed in her husband's heart the sacred steel, Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love; And friends to friends, brothers to brothers, stood Opposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war (Scarce satiable by fate's last death-draught) waged, Drunk from the wine-press of the Almighty's wrath; Whilst the red cross, in mockery of peace, Pointed to victory! When the fray was done, No remnant of the exterminated faith
With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere,
tell its ruin, but the flesh,
on the half-extinguished pile.
Yes! I have seen God's worshipers unsheath
The sword of his revenge, when grace descended,
Confirming all unnatural impulses,
To sanctify their desolating deeds;
And frantic priests waved the ill-omened cross
O'er the unhappy earth: then shone the sun
On showers of gore from the upflashing steel
Of safe assassination, and all crime
Made stingless by the Spirit of the Lord,—
And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.
Spirit! no year of my eventful being
Has passed unstained by crime and misery
Which flows from God's own faith. I've marked his slaves,
With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile
The insensate mob, and, whilst one hand was red
With murder, feign to stretch the other out
For brotherhood and peace. And that they now
Babble of love and mercy (whilst their deeds
Are marked with all the narrowness and crime
That Freedom's young arm dares not yet chastise)
Reason may claim our gratitude, who now,
Establishing the imperishable throne
Of truth and stubborn virtue, maketh vain
The unprevailing malice of my foe;
Whose bootless rage heaps torments for the brave,
Adds impotent eternities to pain,
Whilst keenest disappointment racks his breast
To see the smiles of peace around them play,
To frustrate or to sanctify their doom.
Thus have I stood,-through a wild waste of years
Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,
Yet peaceful and serene and self-enshrined,
Mocking my powerless tyrant's horrible curse
With stubborn and unalterable will;
Even as a giant oak, which heaven's fierce flame
Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand
A monument of fadeless ruin there,-
Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves
The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,
As in the sunlight's calm it spreads
Its worn and withered arms on high
To meet the quiet of a summer's noon.
The Fairy waved her wand:
Ahasuerus fled
Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist
That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove
Flee from the morning beam :
The matter of which dreams are made
Not more endowed with actual life
Than this phantasmal portraiture
Of wandering human thought.
"THE Present and the Past thou hast beheld :
It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn,
The secrets of the Future.-Time!
Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom,
Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,
And from the cradles of eternity,
Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep
By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,
Tear thou that gloomy shroud.--Spirit, behold
Thy glorious destiny!"
Through the wide rent in Time's eternal veil,
Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear.
Earth was no longer hell;
Love, freedom, health, had given
Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,
And all its pulses beat
Symphonious to the planetary spheres:
Then dulcet music swelled
Concordant with the life-strings of the soul;
It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,
new life from transitory death.-
Like the vague sighings of a wind at even, That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea, And dies on the creation of its breath, And sinks and rises, fails and swells, by fits, Was the pure stream of feeling That sprang from these sweet notes, And o'er the Spirit's human sympathies With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed.
Such joy as when a lover sees
The chosen of his soul in happiness,
And witnesses her peace
Whose woe to him were bitterer than death;
Sees her unfaded cheek
Glow mantling in first luxury of health,
Thrills with her lovely eyes,
Which like two stars amid the heaving main
Sparkle through liquid bliss.
Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen.
"I will not call the ghost of ages gone
To unfold the frightful secrets of its lore.
The present now is past;
And those events that desolate the earth
Have faded from the memory of Time,
Who dares not give reality to that
Whose being I annul. To me is given
The wonders of the human world to keep,
Space, matter, time, and mind. Futurity
Exposes now its treasure; let the sight
Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.
O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal
Where virtue fixes universal peace,
And 'midst the ebb and flow of human things
Shows somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,
A light-house o'er the wild of dreary waves.
"The habitable earth is full of bliss.
Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled
By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,
Where matter dared not vegetate nor live,
But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude
Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;
And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles
Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls
Its broad bright surges to the sloping sand,
Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet
To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves,
And melodize with man's blessed nature there.
"Those deserts of immeasurable sand
Whose age-collected fervours scarce allowed
A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring,
Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard's love
Broke on the sultry silentness alone,
Now teem with countless rills and shady woods,
Cornfields and pastures and white cottages.
And where the startled wilderness beheld
A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,
A tigress sating with the flesh of lambs
The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs,
While shouts and howlings through the desert rang, -
Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,
Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles
To see a babe before his mother's door
Sharing his morning's meal
With the green and golden basilisk
That comes to lick his feet.
"Those trackless deeps where many a weary sail
Has seen above the illimitable plain
Morning on night, and night on morning, rise,
Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread
Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea,
Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves
So long have mingled with the gusty wind
In melancholy loneliness, and swept
The desert of those ocean solitudes
But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek,
The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm,
Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds
Of kindliest human impulses respond.
Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,
With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,
And fertile valleys resonant with bliss,
Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave,
Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore,
To meet the kisses of the flowerets there.
"All things are re-created, and the flame
Of consentaneous love inspires all life.
The fertile bosom of the Earth gives suck
To myriads, who still grow beneath her care
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