within the sail
     Of her desire?  What if it shifted with
     Direction of her breath?  Or if the rudder of
     Her will did lean as many ways as trampled straws,
     And own as little worth?  She was a woman still,
     And queen.  They do best understand themselves
     Who trust themselves the least; as they are wisest
     Who, for their safety, thank more the open sea
     Than pilot will.  Oh, Egypt’s self-born Isis! 
     Ought we to fasten in thy memory the fangs
     Of unalloyed distrust?  We know how little
     Better is History’s page than leaf whereat the ink
     Is thrown.  Nor yet should we forget how much
     The nearer thou than we didst come to
     The rough-hewn corner-stone of Time.  We know
     Thy practised love enfolded Antony;
     And that around the heart of Hercules’
     Descendant, threading through and through,
     Like the red rivers of its life, in tangled mesh
     No circumstance could e’er unravel, thou
     Didst coil,—­the dreamy, dazzling “Serpent of
     The Nile!” Thy sins stick jagged out
     From history’s page, and bleeding tear
     Fair Judgment from thy merits.  We perchance
     Do wrong thee, Isis; for that coward, History,
     Who binds in death his object’s jaw and then
     Besmuts her name, hath crossed his focus in
     Another age, and paled his spreading figment from
     Our sight.  Thou art so far back toward
     The primal autocrat whose wish, hyena-like,
     Was his religion, that, appearing as thou dost
     On an horizon new flushed in the first
     Uncertain ray of Altruism, thou seem’st
     More ghost than human.  Yet thou lovest, loving ghost,
     And thy fierce parent flame thyself snuffed out
     Scarce later than the dark’ning of the fire
     Thou gav’st to be eternal vestal of
     Thine Antony’s spirit.  Thou didst love and die
     Of love; let, therefore, no light tongue, brazen
     In censure, say that nothing in thy life
     Became thee like the leaving it.  The cloth
     From which humanity is cut is woven of
     The warp and woof of circumstance, and all
     Are much alike.  We spring from out the mantle, Earth,
     And hide at last beneath it; in the interim
     Our acts are less of us than it.  We are
     No judge, then, of thy sins, thou ending link
     Of Ptolemy’s chain.  Forsooth, we are too much
     O’erfilled with wondering how like to thee
     We all had been, inclipt and dressed in thine
     Own age and circumstance.

The exercises of the evening concluded with the reading of the familiar poem, beginning: 

    “I am dying, Egypt, dying;
     Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast.”