tyrant, and by his strength has prepared freedom and happiness for the human race. That threat with which he arms himself against his executioner, that defiance by which he feels that he can crush him, is prophetic of the ideal future of the new world of America; for much suffering has rendered keen his inner vision, and made of him a seer, and he beholds—
“A sceptre and a throne;
The pipings of glad shepherds on the hills,
Tending the flocks no more to bleed for thee;
The songs of maidens pressing with white feet
The vintage, on thine altars poured no more;
The murmurous bliss of lovers underneath
Dim grape-vine bowers, whose rosy branches press
Not half so close as their warm cheeks untouched
By thoughts of thy brute lust;—the hive-like hum
Of peaceful commonwealths, where sunburnt toil
Reaps for itself the rich earth made its own
By its own labour, lightened with glad hymns
To an omnipotence which thy mad bolts
Would cope with as a spark with the vast sea,—
Even the spirit of free love and peace,
Duty's own recompense through life and death;
These are such harvests as all master-spirits
Reap, haply not on earth, but reap no less
Because the sheaves are bound by hands not theirs;
These are the bloodless daggers wherewithal
They stab fallen tyrants, this their high revenge:
For their best part of life on earth is when
Long after death, prisoned and pent no more,
Their thoughts, their wild dreams even, have become
Part of the necessary air men breathe;
When, like the moon herself behind a cloud,
They shed down light before us on life's sea,
That cheers us to steer onward, still in hope;
Earth with her twining memories ivies o'er
Their holy sepulchres; the chainless sea,
In tempest, or wide calm, repeats their thoughts,
The lightning and the thunder, all free things
Have legends of them for the ears of men.
All other glories are as falling stars,
But universal nature watches theirs:
Such strength is won by love of human kind.”
