Land of the Magyars! though it be
  The tyrant may relink his chain,
Already thine the victory,
  As the just Future measures gain.

Thou hast succeeded, thou hast won
  The deathly travail’s amplest worth;
A nation’s duty thou hast done,
  Giving a hero to our earth.

And he, let come what will of woe
  Hath saved the land he strove to save;
No Cossack hordes, no traitor’s blow,
  Can quench the voice shall haunt his grave.

’I Kossuth am:  O Future, thou
  That clear’st the just and blott’st the vile,
O’er this small dust in reverence bow,
  Remembering what I was erewhile.

’I was the chosen trump wherethrough
  Our God sent forth awakening breath;
Came chains?  Came death?  The strain He blew
  Sounds on, outliving chains and death.’

TO LAMARTINE

1848

I did not praise thee when the crowd,
    ’Witched with the moment’s inspiration,
Vexed thy still ether with hosannas loud,
    And stamped their dusty adoration;
  I but looked upward with the rest,
And, when they shouted Greatest, whispered Best.

They raised thee not, but rose to thee,
    Their fickle wreaths about thee flinging;
So on some marble Phoebus the swol’n sea
    Might leave his worthless seaweed clinging,
  But pious hands, with reverent care,
Make the pure limbs once more sublimely bare.

Now thou’rt thy plain, grand self again,
    Thou art secure from panegyric,
Thou who gav’st politics an epic strain,
    And actedst Freedom’s noblest lyric;
  This side the Blessed Isles, no tree
Grows green enough to make a wreath for thee.

Nor can blame cling to thee; the snow
    From swinish footprints takes no staining,
But, leaving the gross soils of earth below,
    Its spirit mounts, the skies regaining,
  And unresentful falls again,
To beautify the world with dews and rain.

The highest duty to mere man vouchsafed
    Was laid on thee,—­out of wild chaos,
When the roused popular ocean foamed and chafed
    And vulture War from his Imaus
  Snuffed blood, to summon homely Peace,
And show that only order is release.

To carve thy fullest thought, what though
    Time was not granted?  Aye in history,
Like that Dawn’s face which baffled Angelo
    Left shapeless, grander for its mystery,
  Thy great Design shall stand, and day
Flood its blind front from Orients far away.

Who says thy day is o’er?  Control,
    My heart, that bitter first emotion;
While men shall reverence the steadfast soul,
    The heart in silent self-devotion
  Breaking, the mild, heroic mien,
Thou’lt need no prop of marble, Lamartine.

If France reject thee, ’tis not thine,
    But her own, exile that she utters;
Ideal France, the deathless, the divine,
    Will be where thy white pennon flutters,
  As once the nobler Athens went
With Aristides into banishment.