Noah's Warning over Methuselah's Grave

Brothers and men! one moment stay Beside your latest patriarch's grave, While God's just vengeance yet delay, While God's blest mercy yet can save.

Will you compel my tongue to say, That underneath this nameless sod Your hands, with mine, have laid to-day The last on earth who walked with God?

Shall the pale corpse, whose hoary hairs Are just surrendered to decay, Dissolve the chain which bound our years To hundred ages passed away?

Shall six-score years of warnings dread Die like a whisper on the wind? Shall the dark doom above your head, Its blinded victims darker find?

Shall storms from heaven without the world, Find wilder storms from hell within? Shall long-stored, late-come wrath be hurled; Or,—will you, can you turn from sin?

Have patience, if too plain I speak, For time, my sons, is hastening by; Forgive me if my accents break: Shall I be saved and Nature die?

Forgive that pause:—one look to Heaven Too plainly tells me, he is gone, Who long with me in vain had striven For earth and for its peace alone.

He's gone!—my Father—full of days,— From life which left no joy for him; Born in creation's earliest blaze; Dying—himself, its latest beam.

But he is gone! and, oh, behold, Shown in his death, God's latest sign! Than which more plainly never told An Angel's presence His design.

By it, the evening beams withdrawn Before a starless night descend; By it, the last blest spirit born From this beginning of an end;

By all the strife of civil war That beams within yon fated town; By all the heart's worst passions there, That call so loud for vengeance down;

By that vast wall of cloudy gloom, Piled boding round the firmament; By all its presages of doom, Children of men—Repent! Repent!