Looks that fortify despair,
Tones more brave than trumpet’s breath; 40
Tell me, maidens, have ye known
Household charm more sweetly rare,
Grace of woman ampler blown,
Modesty more debonair,
Younger heart with wit full grown? 
Oh for an hour of my prime,
The pulse of my hotter years,
That I might praise her in rhyme
Would tingle your eyelids to tears,
Our sweetness, our strength, and our star, 50
Our hope, our joy, and our trust,
Who lifted us out of the dust,
And made us whatever we are!

IV

Whiter than moonshine upon snow
Her raiment is, but round the hem
Crimson stained; and, as to and fro
Her sandals flash, we see on them,
And on her instep veined with blue,
Flecks of crimson, on those fair feet,
High-arched, Diana-like, and fleet, 60
Fit for no grosser stain than dew: 
Oh, call them rather chrisms than stains,
Sacred and from heroic veins! 
For, in the glory-guarded pass,
Her haughty and far-shining head
She bowed to shrive Leonidas
With his imperishable dead;
Her, too, Morgarten saw,
Where the Swiss lion fleshed his icy paw;
She followed Cromwell’s quenchless star 70
Where the grim Puritan tread
Shook Marston, Naseby, and Dunbar: 
Yea, on her feet are dearer dyes
Yet fresh, nor looked on with untearful eyes.

V

Our fathers found her in the woods
Where Nature meditates and broods,
The seeds of unexampled things
Which Time to consummation brings
Through life and death and man’s unstable moods;
They met her here, not recognized, 80
A sylvan huntress clothed in furs,
To whose chaste wants her bow sufficed,
Nor dreamed what destinies were hers: 
She taught them bee-like to create
Their simpler forms of Church and State;
She taught them to endue
The past with other functions than it knew,
And turn in channels strange the uncertain stream of Fate;
Better than all, she fenced them in their need
With iron-handed Duty’s sternest creed, 90
’Gainst Self’s lean wolf that ravens word and deed.

VI

Why cometh she hither to-day
To this low village of the plain
Far from the Present’s loud highway,
From Trade’s cool heart and seething brain? 
Why cometh she?  She was not far away. 
Since the soul touched it, not in vain,
With pathos of Immortal gain,
’Tis here her fondest memories stay. 
She loves yon pine-bemurmured ridge 100
Where now our broad-browed poet sleeps,
Dear to both Englands; near him he
Who wore the ring of Canace;
But most her heart to rapture leaps
Where stood that era-parting bridge,
O’er which, with footfall still as dew,