2.

Placid completeness, life without a fall
From faith or highest aims, truth’s breachless wall, 300
Surely if any fame can bear the touch,
His will say ‘Here!’ at the last trumpet’s call,
The unexpressive man whose life expressed so much.

VII

1.

Never to see a nation born
Hath been given to mortal man,
Unless to those who, on that summer morn,
Gazed silent when the great Virginian
Unsheathed the sword whose fatal flash
Shot union through the incoherent clash
Of our loose atoms, crystallizing them 310
Around a single will’s unpliant stem,
And making purpose of emotion rash. 
Out of that scabbard sprang, as from its womb,
Nebulous at first but hardening to a star. 
Through mutual share of sunburst and of gloom,
The common faith that made us what we are.

2.

That lifted blade transformed our jangling clans,
Till then provincial, to Americans,
And made a unity of wildering plans;
Here was the doom fixed:  here is marked the date 320
When this New World awoke to man’s estate,
Burnt its last ship and ceased to look behind: 
Nor thoughtless was the choice; no love or hate
Could from its poise move that deliberate mind,
Weighing between too early and too late,
Those pitfalls of the man refused by Fate: 
His was the impartial vision of the great
Who see not as they wish, but as they find. 
He saw the dangers of defeat, nor less
The incomputable perils of success; 330
The sacred past thrown by, an empty rind;
The future, cloud-land, snare of prophets blind;
The waste of war, the ignominy of peace;
On either hand a sullen rear of woes,
Whose garnered lightnings none could guess,
Piling its thunder-heads and muttering ‘Cease!’
Yet drew not back his hand, but gravely chose
The seeming-desperate task whence our new nation rose.

3.

A noble choice and of immortal seed! 
Nor deem that acts heroic wait on chance 340
Or easy were as in a boy’s romance;
The man’s whole life preludes the single deed
That shall decide if his inheritance
Be with the sifted few of matchless breed,
Our race’s sap and sustenance,
Or with the unmotived herd that only sleep and feed. 
Choice seems a thing indifferent:  thus or so,
What matters it?  The Fates with mocking face
Look on inexorable, nor seem to know
Where the lot lurks that gives life’s foremost place. 350
Yet Duty’s leaden casket holds it still,
And but two ways are offered to our will,
Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace,
The problem still for us and all of human race. 
He chose, as men choose, where most danger showed,
Nor ever faltered ’neath the load
Of petty cares, that gall great hearts the most,
But kept right on the strenuous up-hill road,
Strong to the end, above complaint or boast: 
The popular tempest on his rock-mailed coast 360
Wasted its wind-borne spray,
The noisy marvel of a day;
His soul sate still in its unstormed abode.