What potent spirit guides the raptured eye To pierce the shades of dim futurity? Can Wisdom lend, with all her heavenly power, The pledge of Joy’s anticipated hour? Ah, no! she darkly sees the fate of man— Her dim horizon bounded to a span; Or, if she hold an image to the view, ’Tis Nature pictured too severely true. With thee, sweet HOPE! resides the heavenly light, That pours remotest rapture on the sight: Thine is the charm of life’s bewildered way, That calls each slumbering passion into play. Waked by thy touch, I see the sister band, On tiptoe watching, start at thy command, And fly where’er thy mandate bids them steer, To Pleasure’s path, or Glory’s bright career. Primeval HOPE, the Aönian Muses say, When Man and Nature mourned their first decay; When every form of death, and every woe, Shot from malignant stars to earth below, When Murder bared her arm, and rampant War Yoked the red dragons of her iron car, When Peace and Mercy, banished from the plain, Sprung on the viewless winds to heaven again; All all forsook the friendless guilty mind, But HOPE, the charmer, lingered still behind. Thus, while Elijah’s burning wheels prepare From Carmel’s heights to sweep the fields of air.[3] The prophet’s mantle, ere his flight began, Dropt on the world—a sacred gift to man. Auspicious HOPE! in thy sweet garden grow Wreaths for each toil, a charm for every woe; Won by their sweets, in Nature’s languid hour, The way-worn pilgrim seeks thy summer bower; There, as the wild bee murmurs on the wing, What peaceful dreams thy handmaid spirits bring! What viewless forms the Æolian organ play, And sweep the furrowed lines of anxious thought away. Angel of life! thy glittering wings explore Earth’s loneliest bounds, and Ocean’s wildest shore. Lo! to the wintry winds the pilot yields His bark careering o’er unfathomed fields; Now on Atlantic waves he rides afar, Where Andes, giant of the western star, With meteor-standard to the winds unfurled, Looks from his throne of clouds o’er half the world! Now far he sweeps, where scarce a summer smiles, On Behring’s rocks, or Greenland’s naked isles: Cold on his midnight watch the breezes blow, From wastes that slumber in eternal snow; And waft, across the wave’s tumultuous roar, The wolf’s long howl from Oonalaska’s shore. Poor child of danger, nursling of the storm, Sad are the woes that wreck thy manly form! Rocks, waves, and winds, the shattered bark delay; Thy heart is sad, thy home is far away.