Where parasitic greed no more should coil
Bound Freedom’s stem to bend awry and blight
What grew so fair, sole plant of love and light? 
Who sit where once in crowned seclusion sate
The long-proved athletes of debate 210
Trained from their youth, as none thinks needful now? 
Is this debating club where boys dispute,
And wrangle o’er their stolen fruit,
The Senate, erewhile cloister of the few,
Where Clay once flashed and Webster’s cloudy brow
Brooded those bolts of thought that all the horizon knew?

3.

Oh, as this pensive moonlight blurs my pines,
Here while I sit and meditate these lines,
To gray-green dreams of what they are by day,
So would some light, not reason’s sharp-edged ray, 220
Trance me in moonshine as before the flight
Of years had won me this unwelcome right
To see things as they are, or shall he soon,
In the frank prose of undissembling noon!

4.

Back to my breast, ungrateful sigh! 
Whoever fails, whoever errs,
The penalty be ours, not hers! 
The present still seems vulgar, seen too nigh;
The golden age is still the age that’s past: 
I ask no drowsy opiate 230
To dull my vision of that only state
Founded on faith in man, and therefore sure to last. 
For, O my country, touched by thee,
The gray hairs gather back their gold;
Thy thought sets all my pulses free;
The heart refuses to be old;
The love is all that I can see. 
Not to thy natal-day belong
Time’s prudent doubt or age’s wrong,
But gifts of gratitude and song: 
Unsummoned crowd the thankful words, 241
As sap in spring-time floods the tree. 
Foreboding the return of birds,
For all that thou hast been to me!

IV

1.

Flawless his heart and tempered to the core
Who, beckoned by the forward-leaning wave,
First left behind him the firm-footed shore,
And, urged by every nerve of sail and oar,
Steered for the Unknown which gods to mortals gave. 
Of thought and action the mysterious door, 250
Bugbear of fools, a summons to the brave: 
Strength found he in the unsympathizing sun,
And strange stars from beneath the horizon won,
And the dumb ocean pitilessly grave: 
High-hearted surely he;
But bolder they who first off-cast
Their moorings from the habitable Past
And ventured chartless on the sea
Of storm-engendering Liberty: 
For all earth’s width of waters is a span, 260
And their convulsed existence mere repose,
Matched with the unstable heart of man,
Shoreless in wants, mist-girt in all it knows,
Open to every wind of sect or clan,
And sudden-passionate in ebbs and flows.

2.