Iv

1.

How many subtlest influences unite, With spiritual touch of Joy or pain, Invisible as air and soft as light, To body forth that image of the brain We call our Country, visionary shape, Loved more than woman, fuller of fire than wine, Whose charm can none define, Nor any, though he flee it, can escape! All party-colored threads the weaver Time Sets in his web, now trivial, now sublime, All memories, all forebodings, hopes and fears, Mountain and river, forest, prairie, sea, A hill, a rock, a homestead, field, or tree, The casual gleanings of unreckoned years, Take goddess-shape at last and there is She, Old at our birth, new as the springing hours, Shrine of our weakness, fortress of our powers, Consoler, kindler, peerless 'mid her peers, A force that 'neath our conscious being stirs, A life to give ours permanence, when we Are borne to mingle our poor earth with hers, And all this glowing world goes with us on our biers.

2.

Nations are long results, by ruder ways Gathering the might that warrants length of days; They may be pieced of half-reluctant shares Welded by hammer-strokes of broad-brained kings, Or from a doughty people grow, the heirs Of wise traditions widening cautious rings; At best they are computable things, A strength behind us making us feel bold In right, or, as may chance, in wrong; Whose force by figures may be summed and told, So many soldiers, ships, and dollars strong, And we but drops that bear compulsory part In the dumb throb of a mechanic heart; But Country is a shape of each man's mind Sacred from definition, unconfined By the cramped walls where daily drudgeries grind; An inward vision, yet an outward birth Of sweet familiar heaven and earth; A brooding Presence that stirs motions blind Of wings within our embryo being's shell That wait but her completer spell To make us eagle-natured, fit to dare Life's nobler spaces and untarnished air.

3.

You, who hold dear this self-conceived ideal, Whose faith and works alone can make it real, Bring all your fairest gifts to deck her shrine Who lifts our lives away from Thine and Mine And feeds the lamp of manhood more divine With fragrant oils of quenchless constancy. When all have done their utmost, surely he Hath given the best who gives a character Erect and constant, which nor any shock Of loosened elements, nor the forceful sea Of flowing or of ebbing fates, can stir From its deep bases in the living rock Of ancient manhood's sweet security: And this he gave, serenely far from pride As baseness, boon with prosperous stars allied, Part of what nobler seed shall in our loins abide.

4.

No bond of men as common pride so strong, In names time-filtered for the lips of song, Still operant, with the primal Forces bound Whose currents, on their spiritual round, Transfuse our mortal will nor are gainsaid: These are their arsenals, these the exhaustless mines That give a constant heart in great designs; These are the stuff whereof such dreams are made As make heroic men: thus surely he Still holds in place the massy blocks he laid 'Neath our new frame, enforcing soberly The self-control that makes and keeps a people free.