Poems (Botta)/Webster
For works with similar titles, see Webster.
WEBSTER.
“When I and all those that hear me shall have gone to our last home, and when the mould may have gathered on our memories, as it will on our tombs:’’—Webster’s Speech in the Senate, July, 1850.
The mould upon thy memory!—No, Not while one note is rung,Of those divine, immortal songs Milton and Shakspeare sung;—Not till the night of years enshrouds The Anglo-Saxon tongue.
No! let the flood of Time roll on, And men and empires die;—Genius enthroned on lofty heights Can its dread course defy,And here on earth, can claim the gift Of immortality:
Can save from that Lethean tide That sweeps so dark along,A people’s name;—a people’s fame To future time prolong,As Troy still lives and only lives In Homer’s deathless song.
What though to buried Nineveh The traveller may come,And roll away the stone that hides That long forgotten tomb;—He questions its mute past in vain, Its oracles are dumb.
What though he stand where Balbec stood Gigantic in its pride;No voice comes o’er that silent waste, Lone, desolate and wide;—They had no bard, no orator, No statesman,—and they died.
They lived their little span of life, They lived and died in vain;—They sank ingloriously beneath Oblivion’s silent reign,As sank beneath the Dead Sea wave The Cities of the Plain.
But for those famed, immortal lands, Greece and imperial Rome,Where Genius left its shining mark, And found its chosen home,All eloquent with mind they speak, Wood, wave and crumbling dome.
The honeyed words of Plato still Float on the echoing air,The thunders of Demosthenes Ægean waters bear,And the pilgrim to the Forum hears The voice of Tully there.
And thus thy memory shall live, And thus thy fame resound,While far-off future ages roll Their solemn cycles round,And make this wide, this fair New World An ancient, classic ground.
Then with our Country’s glorious name Thine own shall be entwined;Within the Senate’s pillared hall Thine image shall be shrined;And on the nation’s Law shall gleam Light from thy giant mind.
Our proudest monuments no more May rise to meet the sky,The stately Capitol o’erthrown, Low in the dust may lie;But mind, sublime above the wreck, Immortal—cannot die.