Go fight for Freedom, Warriors of the West!
At last the word is spoken: Go!
Lay on for Liberty. ‘Twas at her breast
The tyrant aimed his blow;
And ye were wounded with the rest
In Belgium’s overthrow.
The anguish of the night is past,
The months of torment, when the roar
Of distant battles rolled against our shore,
Each summons sounding louder than the last;
And in the surge and swell
We heard the deep vibrations of a bell,
The tongue of Fate, that tolling on the blast,
Repeated o’er and o’er
“Awake! your horoscope is cast;
The Old World and the New shall live apart no more.
Awake! the Future claims you. Europe’s soul
Hangs in the balance, and the gods contrive
That without her thou never canst be whole,
Nor she without thee save her soul alive.
“Like to the sleeping hero dost thou lie,
Whose father’s gear the nymphs beneath a mound
Concealed, while centaurs watched his infancy
Till honor’s great occasion should be found.
Awake! the virgins perish, monsters rage;
The earth is mastered by Hell’s Overlord;
Accept the manhood of thine heritage:
Behold the shield, the sandals and the sword.”
The dying thunder of the ocean’s voice
Left music on the air. The sleeper stirred,
As one who in a dream must make a choice
Of pleasure mixed with pain.
Something he muttered like a broken word;
Then heaved his length and seemed to sleep again.
And still the awful weight of that recurrent sound
Smote on our shores and seemed to shake the ground.
So long, before our lips, fate held the cup, –
So long we waited for the dawn, –
We scarcely breathed or dared look up
For fear that draught of life should be withdrawn.
Vain fears! the stars that shined upon our birth
Had made us freedom’s champions on the earth.
Thanks be to God, our page of history
Flashes with all one lightning; one design
From first to last appears in every line,
Which, being noted, makes the tale divine,
But being missed or slighted, all becomes
A meaningless and aimless revery, –
A tale of moving mobs and swords and drums,
A maze without a key, –
A history of pebbles which the sea
Disturbs and rearranges endlessly.
Time was, the world a vision saw.
A faith was born in nations far away
From whom our life and mind we draw, –
A hope, as when the earliest ray
Of peeping dawn predicts the day.
The ancient peoples of the time-worn earth
Divined the meaning of our birth
Before our life began:
The Vision was America,
The Faith was faith in man.
Thus, when our fathers crossed the sea
To found a state that should become
The Capitol of Liberty,
And Freedom’s home,
The hopes of Europe with them came,
And in the new republic’s name
P
(John Jay Chapman)
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