Usurping treason seized the civic helm, Wrong trampled right, and justice, judgment, fled. Then strife, division, hosts to battle led; The prophets, mocked, lift warning voice in vain; A blood-soaked continent, a sea, of dead, And of that mighty nation, fallen, self-slain. A prophet and a king, a solitary twain. That prophet saw the coming of the Lord Unto the Old, the New, Jerusalem; Saw Israel returning at His word From wheresoever His will had scattered them; The realm's wide ruin saw, and strove to stem. That king, sole scion of a slaughtered race, Casting his blood-stained sword and diadem, Lived but to see another nation place Firm foot upon the soil, then vanished from its face. The advent of the Nephite colony is told in the following manner. Again athwart the wilderness of waves, Surging old East and older West between, Where the lone sea the flowery Southland laves, And crowns o'er many climes the Chilean queen, Braving the swell, a storm-tossed bark is seen. From doomed Jerusalem, to Jacob dear, Albeit a leper, groping, blind, unclean, Goes forth Manasseh's prophet pioneer, Predestined to unveil the hidden hemisphere. His lot to reap and plant on this far shore The promise of his fathers. Joseph's bough, From Jacob's well, the billowy wall runs o'er. Abides in strength the archer-stricken bow, Unto the utmost bound prevailing now, Of Hesper's heaven-inviting hills. Bend sheaves Of Israel, as branches bend with snow, Unto his sheaf as mightiest; and as leaves For multitude, the son the great sire's glory weaves. The cataclysms which took place in this western world during the crucifixion and entombment of Messiah and His subsequent advent in the western world, His teaching the gospel here, and the establishment of His Church is told by our poet in the following strains. All this and more the prescient monarch saw; Messiah's self, Jehovah, Him beheld; The Lamb of God, in whom was found no flaw, Though Hate's black billows round Him surged and swelled; Life's deathless tree--deathless, though demon-felled; The crash resounding to this far-off shore, Whose winnowed remnant welcomed Him revealed In risen glory, when had ceased the roar And raging of the tempest heralds sent before. At whose rebuke the haughty mountains bowed, Shorn by the whirlwind, sunk, or swept away, No more their frown the lowly valleys cowed, Rising like billows 'mid the wrathful fray, And dashing 'gainst the skies their dusty spray. Rocks, boulders, hills, no Titan strength could lift, Hurtle as pebbles in the storm-fiend's play. Earth opes her jaws, and through the yawning rift, Cities, peoples, vanish, of hope, of life, bereft.