They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires, Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires; Shall we make their creed our jailer? Shall we, in our haste to slay, From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day?
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key. 90
What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or humbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!
No more the landscape holds its wealth apart, Making me poorer in my poverty, But mingles with my senses and my heart; 10 My own projected spirit seems to me In her own reverie the world to steep; 'Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep, Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree.
How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms, Each into each, the hazy distances! The softened season all the landscape charms; Those hills, my native village that embay, In waves of dreamier purple roll away, 20 And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.
Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves; The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by, So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.
The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates, 30 Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne, Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits; Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails; Silently overhead the hen-hawk sails, With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.