The Old Time passed into the New;
Where, as your stealthy river creeps,
He whispers to his listening weeds
Tales of sublimest homespun deeds. 110
Here English law and English thought
’Gainst the self-will of England fought;
And here were men (coequal with their fate),
Who did great things, unconscious they were great. 
They dreamed not what a die was cast
With that first answering shot; what then? 
There was their duty; they were men
Schooled the soul’s inward gospel to obey,
Though leading to the lion’s den. 
They felt the habit-hallowed world give way 120
Beneath their lives, and on went they,
Unhappy who was last. 
When Buttrick gave the word,
That awful idol of the unchallenged Past,
Strong in their love, and in their lineage strong,
Fell crashing; if they heard it not,
Yet the earth heard,
Nor ever hath forgot,
As on from startled throne to throne,
Where Superstition sate or conscious Wrong, 130
A shudder ran of some dread birth unknown. 
Thrice venerable spot! 
River more fateful than the Rubicon! 
O’er those red planks, to snatch her diadem,
Man’s Hope, star-girdled, sprang with them,
And over ways untried the feet of Doom strode on.

VII

Think you these felt no charms
In their gray homesteads and embowered farms? 
In household faces waiting at the door
Their evening step should lighten up no more? 140
In fields their boyish feet had known? 
In trees their fathers’ hands had set,
And which with them had grown,
Widening each year their leafy coronet? 
Felt they no pang of passionate regret
For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own? 
These things are dear to every man that lives,
And life prized more for what it lends than gives. 
Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet,
Strove to detain their fatal feet;
And yet the enduring half they chose, 151
Whose choice decides a man life’s slave or king,
The invisible things of God before the seen and known: 
Therefore their memory inspiration blows
With echoes gathering on from zone to zone;
For manhood is the one immortal thing
Beneath Time’s changeful sky,
And, where it lightened once, from age to age,
Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage,
That length of days is knowing when to die. 160

VIII

What marvellous change of things and men! 
She, a world-wandering orphan then,
So mighty now!  Those are her streams
That whirl the myriad, myriad wheels
Of all that does, and all that dreams,
Of all that thinks, and all that feels,
Through spaces stretched from sea to sea;
By idle tongues and busy brains,
By who doth right, and who refrains,
Here are our losses and our gains; 170
Our maker and our victim she.