Page:Roden Noel - A Little Child's Monument - 1881.pdf/141

If we may reach you, we may find you naught,
Mere human visions, hollow and glamour-fraught!
Where now the morning-land of Love we saw?
Vanished, a pure white snow-wreath in a thaw!
Where youth's high hope to order the wild world?
A once-bright banner, mouldering and furled!
The stern resolve to mould a world within?
Dead in deep jungles of inveterate sin!

Or may the race prove conqueror, tho' we fall?
Through long-vexed infancy the tribes grow tall,
Then slow declining, falter to the grave;
Nor wiser, happier, they who bloom and wave
In their rank ruin: whatsoe'er the gain,
Some earlier glory of the flower will wane!
No sweet sound food, the fruit of wrong and pain
Ah! dear young children, cankered in the bud,
Surely the harvest battening on your blood
Must be transcendent, ere we may embrace
Meekly the holocaust of all your grace!
Nay! for no triumph splendid as the sun
Were an atonement for the loss of one.
Poor hearts expiring rend with wail sublime
God's vast world-palace, founded upon crime,
Whose ponderous, hell-poised blocks for their cement
Have meek red blood of all the innocent!
Nay, some faint protest of a humblest heart