The boisterous carousal and the sound
Of wassail mirth, inebriate and loud,
And midnight revelry, is hushed and still.

Time shifts the scenes—­
The haughty prince and the most abject slave,
Who cowered and trembled ’neath his austere glance,
The fawning and ignoble sycophant,
The courtier and the basest serf, have met
On equal terms beneath the silent dust.

From thy celestial ’minions thou hast seen
His proudest temples sink into decay,
Grim desolation and desuetude;
The silent hush succeed the plaintive hymn,
The anthem cease to swell in rhythmic praise,
Or vaulted dome re-echo with the sound
Of pipe, of organ, harp and dulcimer;
The voice of sacerdotal eloquence
Become as silent as the unborn thought;
The fragrant perfume of the frankincense,
The scent of swinging censor and of myrrh,
Supplanted by foul odors of decay;
The sacred flame extinguished and forgot,
Its votaries and congregations fled;
The forms who ministered and forms who knelt,
The burnished altar and the hoary priest,
Commingling their atoms in the dust.

* * * * *

Thou, too, hast heard the clash of hostile arms,
The blast of trumpet and the martial tread,
The neigh of charger anxious for the fray,
The din and the confusion of the fight,
The noise and turmoil of contending hosts,
The crunch of breaking bones and shrieks of pain;
The angry challenge and defiant taunt,
The cries of rage and curses of despair,
The dying groan and gnash of clench-ed teeth,
The plea for mercy, with uplifted arms,
As through the bosom plunged the ruthless steel;
The clank of shackles and the captives groan,
As marched the vanquished forth to servitude,
To ceaseless toil rewarded by the scourge;
To stand within the slave marts and endure
The taunts and bear the chains of slavery.

Did’st thou look down with neutral radiance
On that incursion from the Scythian plain,
A surging multitude beyond the power
Of mental computation and which seemed
A seething mass of spears and shapes of war,
A sea of bellicose barbarity,
O’erwhelming helpless and ill-fated Tyre
With a resistless deluge of the sword?

Or when that vast and uncomputed horde
Swept westward from the steppes of Tartary
With stern Atilla riding at its head,
Leaving in ruthless Mongol truculence,
Awake, both red and blackened by the torch;
The scourge[F], perhaps of God, perhaps of Hell!

Did’st thou not flinch when t’ward the Christian west
The fell invasion of the Saracen
Headed its course with crimson scimitar;
Supplanting the mild precepts of the Cross
With those of lust, of hate and bigotry?

* * * * *

Did’st thou not weep when proud Atlantis sunk
Beneath the surging and engulfing waves,
The aftermath of Earth’s most tragic shock;
Or when the ark, upon that greatest flood,
Which from the black and pregnant heavens fell. 
For forty days and forty weary nights,
Above the ruins of a deluged world,
Floated in safety with its living freight?