We trusted then, aspired, believed
  That earth could be remade to-morrow;
Ah, why be ever undeceived? 
  Why give up faith for sorrow?

O thou, whose days are yet all spring,
  Faith, blighted one, is past retrieving;
Experience is a dumb, dead thing;
  The victory’s in believing.

FREEDOM

Are we, then, wholly fallen?  Can it be
That thou, North wind, that from thy mountains bringest
Their spirit to our plains, and thou, blue sea,
Who on our rocks thy wreaths of freedom flingest,
As on an altar,—­can it be that ye
Have wasted inspiration on dead ears,
Dulled with the too familiar clank of chains? 
The people’s heart is like a harp for years
Hung where some petrifying torrent rains
Its slow-incrusting spray:  the stiffened chords 10
Faint and more faint make answer to the tears
That drip upon them:  idle are all words: 
Only a golden plectrum wakes the tone
Deep buried ’neath that ever-thickening stone.

We are not free:  doth Freedom, then, consist
In musing with our faces toward the Past,
While petty cares and crawling interests twist
Their spider-threads about us, which at last
Grow strong as iron chains, to cramp and bind
In formal narrowness heart, soul and mind? 20
Freedom is re-created year by year,
In hearts wide open on the Godward side,
In souls calm-cadenced as the whirling sphere,
In minds that sway the future like a tide. 
He broadest creeds can hold her, and no codes;
She chooses men for her august abodes,
Building them fair and fronting to the dawn;
Yet, when we seek her, we but find a few
Light footprints, leading mornward through the dew: 
Before the day had risen, she was gone. 30

And we must follow:  swiftly runs she on,
And, if our steps should slacken in despair,
Half turns her face, half smiles through golden hair,
Forever yielding, never wholly won: 
That is not love which pauses in the race
Two close-linked names on fleeting sand to trace;
Freedom gained yesterday is no more ours;
Men gather but dry seeds of last year’s flowers;
Still there’s a charm uugranted, still a grace,
Still rosy Hope, the free, the unattained, 40
Makes us Possession’s languid hand let fall;
’Tis but a fragment of ourselves is gained,
The Future brings us more, but never all.

And, as the finder of some unknown realm,
Mounting a summit whence he thinks to see
On either side of him the imprisoning sea,
Beholds, above the clouds that overwhelm
The valley-land, peak after snowy peak
Stretch out of sight, each like a silver helm
Beneath its plume of smoke, sublime and bleak, 50
And what he thought an island finds to be
A continent to him first oped,—­so we
Can from our height of Freedom look along
A boundless future, ours if we be strong;
Or if we shrink, better remount our ships
And, fleeing God’s express design, trace back
The hero-freighted Mayflower’s prophet-track
To Europe entering her blood-red eclipse.