So the Evil’s triumph sendeth, with a terror and a chill,
    Under continent to continent, the sense of coming ill,
    And the slave, where’er he cowers, feels his sympathies with God
    In hot tear-drops ebbing earthward, to be drunk up by the sod,
    Till a corpse crawls round unburied, delving in the nobler clod. 15

    For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,
    Round the earth’s electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;
    Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity’s vast frame
    Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame;—­
    In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim. 20

    Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
    In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
    Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
    Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
    And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light. 25

    Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,
    Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land? 
    Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’t is Truth alone is strong,
    And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng
    Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong. 30

    Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see,
    That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion’s sea;
    Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry
    Of those Crises, God’s stern winnowers, from whose feet earth’s chaff
          must fly;
    Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by. 35

    Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
    One death-grapple in the darkness ’twixt old systems and the Word;
    Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the Throne,—­
    Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
    Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. 40

    We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
    Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,
    But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din,
    List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,—­
    “They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.” 45

    Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,
    Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,
    Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,
    Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;—­
    Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play? 50