Watching the GOP debate last night, and mulling over the future of America, this poem came to mind, and since it was just that good, I felt it deserved to be shared - and remembered - in the upcoming Presidential race!
The Present Crisis
When a deed is done for freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stems of Time.
Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro;
At the birth of each new Era, with recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation standing with mute lips apart,
And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart
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.
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.
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,
Part the goats upon the lefthand, and the sheep upon the right
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
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.
Backward look across the ages and the beacon--monuments 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.
Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record
One death struggle 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.
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"...
'T is as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves
Of a legendary virtue carved upon our fathers' graves,
Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime
------
Was the Mayflower launched by cowards, steered by men behind their time?
Turn those tracks toward past or future that made Plymouth Rock sublime?
They were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts,
Unconvinced by ax or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's;
But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free,
Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee
The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the sea.
They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires
Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires
Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay,
From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away
To light up the martyr-(fires) round the prophets of today?
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be;
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-stained key.
- James Russell Lowell
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