They tell us that our land was made for song,
With its huge rivers and sky-piercing peaks,
Its sealike lakes and mighty cataracts, 20
Its forests vast and hoar, and prairies wide,
And mounds that tell of wondrous tribes extinct. 
But Poesy springs not from rocks and woods;
Her womb and cradle are the human heart,
And she can find a nobler theme for song
In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight
Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore
Between the frozen deserts of the poles. 
All nations have their message from on high,
Each the messiah of some central thought, 30
For the fulfilment and delight of Man: 
One has to teach that labor is divine;
Another Freedom; and another Mind;
And all, that God is open-eyed and just,
The happy centre and calm heart of all.

Are, then, our woods, our mountains, and our streams,
Needful to teach our poets how to sing? 
O maiden rare, far other thoughts were ours,
When we have sat by ocean’s foaming marge,
And watched the waves leap roaring on the rocks, 40
Than young Leander and his Hero had,
Gazing from Sestos to the other shore. 
The moon looks down and ocean worships her,
Stars rise and set, and seasons come and go
Even as they did in Homer’s elder time,
But we behold them not with Grecian eyes: 
Then they were types of beauty and of strength,
But now of freedom, unconflned and pure,
Subject alone to Order’s higher law. 
What cares the Russian serf or Southern slave 50
Though we should speak as man spake never yet
Of gleaming Hudson’s broad magnificence,
Or green Niagara’s never-ending roar? 
Our country hath a gospel of her own
To preach and practise before all the world,—­
The freedom and divinity of man,
The glorious claims of human brotherhood,—­
Which to pay nobly, as a freeman should,
Gains the sole wealth that will not fly away,—­
And the soul’s fealty to none but God. 60
These are realities, which make the shows
Of outward Nature, be they ne’er so grand,
Seem small, and worthless, and contemptible. 
These are the mountain-summits for our bards,
Which stretch far upward into heaven itself,
And give such widespread and exulting view
Of hope, and faith, and onward destiny,
That shrunk Parnassus to a molehill dwindles. 
Our new Atlantis, like a morning-star,
Silvers the mirk face of slow-yielding Night, 70
The herald of a fuller truth than yet
Hath gleamed upon the upraised face of Man
Since the earth glittered in her stainless prime,—­
Of a more glorious sunrise than of old
Drew wondrous melodies from Memnon huge,
Yea, draws them still, though now he sit waist-deep
In the ingulfing flood of whirling sand,
And look across the wastes of endless gray,
Sole wreck, where once his hundred-gated Thebes
Pained with her mighty hum the calm, blue heaven: