There’s freedom at thy gates and rest For Earth’s down-trodden and opprest, A shelter for the hunted head, For the starved laborer toil and bread. Power, at thy bounds, Stops and calls back his baffled hounds. Oh, fair young mother! on thy brow Shall sit a nobler grace than now. Deep in the brightness of the skies The thronging years in glory rise, And, as they fleet, Drop strength and riches at thy feet. Thine eye, with every coming hour, Shall brighten, and thy form shall tower; And when thy sisters, elder born, Would brand thy name with words of scorn, Before thine eye, Upon their lips the taunt shall die. ODE BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON (Sung in the Town Hall, Concord, July 4, 1857.) O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire. The cannon booms from town to town, Our pulses beat not less, The joy-bells chime their tidings down, Which children’s voices bless. For He that flung the broad blue fold O’er-mantling land and sea, One third part of the sky unrolled For the banner of the free. The men are ripe of Saxon kind To build an equal state,— To take the statute from the mind And make of duty fate. United States! the ages plead,— Present and Past in under-song,— Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue. For sea and land don’t understand Nor skies without a frown See rights for which the one hand fights By the other cloven down. Be just at home; then write your scroll Of honor o’er the sea, And bid the broad Atlantic roll A ferry of the free. And henceforth there shall be no chain, Save underneath the sea The wires shall murmur through the main Sweet songs of liberty. The conscious stars accord above, The waters wild below, And under, through the cable wove, Her fiery errands go. AMERICA FIRST[12] ANONYMOUS This is the season when Young America celebrates the glorious deeds of the forefathers, when they cut the leading-strings that bound them to the Old World, and stepped forth with the independence of manhood. It took Rome five hundred years, five centuries of war, intrigue and arrogance, to overspread Southern Europe. In a little more than one century America has grown to a magnitude in area and perhaps in population also, equal to that of Rome in its most magnificent days. “_Civis Romanus sum!_” was the proudest boast that could fall from the lips of man at the beginning of the Christian era. Is there to-day an American who rates his citizenship in the Great Republic at a lower value than Roman freedom nineteen hundred years ago?