You were a foreman with the gift of leading, When pioneers cleared up a pathless tract; Your lucid thinking and your gracious tact Oft helped them over obstacles impeding. But what new growths the ancient fields have filled, From western seed to feed our land's wants tilled, And what new light shines through your window-pane, Longing for truth beneath religion's reign, And what new things but whispering we say,-- And what foretells the dawning reckoning-day,-- You fail to understand and find but madness In our young nation's fairest growth and gladness. You answer: Poet's deeming is but dreaming, And in the statesman's art most unbeseeming. I answer: None has might men's life to sway, If impotent the worth of dreams to weigh. From cravings, powers that seek their form, ascending, They fill the air; their right to be defending, Till all men wakened to one goal are tending. His nation's dreams are all the statesman's life, Create his might, direct his aim in strife, And if he this forgets, the next dreams blooming Bring forth another, unto death him dooming. The tempest-clouds that mount afresh and thicken Cannot so dense before the morn's light hover That we may not through cloud-rifts clear discover Great thoughts that new-born victories shall quicken. Such thoughts are radiant over me to-day, And to my heart the warmer blood is streaming, And all we live for, all that we are dreaming, Its summons sends and strengthens for the fray. The war-horns soon beneath the woods shall bray, Through dewy night th' assailing columns dash, Amid the sudden gleams of shot and slash The fog dissolve before our new-born day. Soon, though you threaten, will the heights be taken For future ages, and our nation's soul Can thence o'erlook the land in might unshaken, With even hand and right to rule the whole. It soon shall roll war's billows on to battle, While from the clouds the fathers' weapons rattle! O aged man, look round you where you stand, For soon you have against you all our land. But when you fall defeated on the field, Then shall we say by your inverted shield: He stood against us, since he knew not better, A noble knight and never honor's debtor. ON A WIFE'S DEATH (See Note 55) With death's dark eye acquainted she had been made ere this, When to her son, her first-born, she gave the farewell kiss, And when afar she hastened beside her mother's bed, It followed all her faring with warning fraught and dread; It filled her with foreboding when standing by the bier: More sheaves to gather hopeth the harvester austere. So soon she saw her husband, that man of strength, succumb, She said with sorrow stricken: « I knew that it would come!" She thought that he was chosen by God from earth to go, Would check, her hands upthrusting, the harsh behest of woe; And with her slender body, too weak for such a strife, Would ward her gallant consort,--and gave for him her life.