A galley slave in age and clime remote,
  Chained to his seat, unwilling plies the oar;
Before his eyes fond dreams of freedom float,
  He hopes amid the battle’s crash and roar;
And as the waves the imprisoned wretches drown,
Hopes, as his fetters draw him swiftly down.

A mighty host in force of arms we see,
  With march invasive, cross a boundary line;
At its approach no freemen turn and flee,
  Each with his life defends his family shrine;
As burning homes illuminate the sky
With ghastly light, they hope and fight and die.

Beside the bed where rests the pallid form,
  Of loved one stricken with the fever’s breath,
E’en when the loving hands, no longer warm,
  Portend the sure and swift approach of Death,
Hope holds the spirit in its house of clay,
And with that spirit only, soars away.

The guilty wretch, for murder doomed to die,
  Hoped, in his dungeon as the death watch paced,
Hoped, as the death cap veiled his evil eye,
  Hoped, as the noose around his neck was placed,
Hoped, as the chaplain read his final prayer,
Hoped, as he struggled in the viewless air.

In the glad sunshine of life’s vernal spring,
  Hope buoys the spirit with expectancy;
Hope with her dulcet voice and fluttering wing,
  Sings of life’s goal with siren harmony;
When silvered temples tell that life declines,
That goal, though yet unreached, still brightly shines.

Yes!  As through failure and vicissitude,
  We sail along with many an adverse wind,
Hope plants her beacon in the tempest rude,
  And leads with generous radiance unconfined;
And when the yawning grave receives its prey,
Hope speeds the spirit on its astral way.

Metabole.

An apostrophe to the moon.

O, silvery moon, fair mistress of the night,
Thou mellow, ever vaccilating orb,
How many eons of unmeasured time
Hast thou, observant from thy astral poise,
Thy ever-changing station in the skies,
Beheld the wastes of earth, of air and space—­
Ruling the waters, and the sombre night?

Pale queen of night, fair coquette of the skies,
Thou, who with fickle, sweet inconstancy
Receives the smile from the admiring sun,
And straight transmits it to the sordid earth,—­
How many cycles of the silent past
Hast thou beheld the rise and fall of man,
His proud ascendency and swift decline;
His zenith and his pitiful decay;
E’er he emerged from out the dismal cave,
His habitation rude and primitive;
E’er yet the forest trembled at his stroke,
E’er his indenting chisel cleaved the stones
And framed the first crude human domicile?

As time rolled on and human skill advanced
By almost imperceptible degrees
Of slow, experimental tutorage,
Along a nobler, more artistic plane,
He hewed the stones in form of ornament,
Sculptured device of various design,
Embellishment of cunning symmetry,
Man’s first attempt to scale the realms of art.