"You steal Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought, With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught; Your literature suits its each whisper and motion To what will be thought of it over the ocean; The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship tries And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies;-- Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood, To which the dull current in hers is but mud; Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails, In her voice there's a tremble e'en now while she rails, And your shore will soon be in the nature of things Covered thick with gilt driftwood of runaway kings, Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow's Waif, Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe. O, my friends, thank your God, if you have one, that he 'Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea, Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines, By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs, Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age, As a statue by Powers, or a picture by Page, Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, all things make new, To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true, Keep your ears open wide to the Future's first call, Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all, Stand fronting the dawn on Toil's heaven-scaling peaks, And become my new race of more practical Greeks.-- Hem! your likeness at present, I shudder to tell o't, Is that you have your slaves, and the Greek had his helot."