THE NAME of Commonwealth is past and gone,
Over three
fractions of the groaning globe:�
Venice is crushed, and
Holland deigns to own
A sceptre, and endures a purple
robe:
If the free Switzer yet bestrides alone
His
chainless mountains, 't is but for a time;
For tyranny of
late has cunning grown,
And, in its own good season,
tramples down
The sparkles of our ashes. One great clime,
Whose vigorous offspring by dividing ocean
Are kept
apart, and nursed in the devotion
Of Freedom, which their
fathers fought for, and
Bequeathed,�a heritage of heart
and hand,
And proud distinction from each other land,
Whose sons must bow them at a monarch's motion,
As if his
senseless sceptre were a wand
Full of the magic of
exploded science,�
Still one great clime, in full and
free defiance,
Yet rears her crest, unconquered and
sublime,
Above the far Atlantic! She has taught
Her
Esau-brethren that the haughty flag,
The floating fence
of Albion's feebler crag,
May strike to those whose red
right hands have bought
Rights cheaply earned with blood.
Still, still, forever
Better, though each man's
life-blood were a river
That it should flow and overflow,
than creep
Through thousand lazy channels in our veins,
Dammed, like the dull canal, with locks and chains,
And
moving, as a sick man in his sleep,
Three paces, and then
faltering: better be
Where the extinguished Spartans
still are free,
In their proud charnel of Thermopyl�,
Than stagnate in our marsh; or o'er the deep
Fly, and one
current to the ocean add,
One spirit to the souls our
fathers had,
One freeman more, America, to thee! |
