The Garden of Years and Other Poems/The White Republic
The White Republic
OF Pilgrim eyes previsioned and Puritan lips foretold,
Dowered with wealth of woodland and glory of virgin gold,
Awoke the White Republic, the gift of the Lord Most High,
As broad and free as the borders be of her own wide western sky!
Mother of loyal daughters, whose girdle and guard are these—
Their leagues of inland waters and bulwarks of splendid seas,
Each to the other plighted till the end of time they stand,
Palmetto to pine united and prairie to pasture-land.
She hath store of grain ungarnered and harvests her sons have sown,
She is jewelled with mines unminted whose measure no man hath known,
And the light of her eyes is steady, and her onward march is free,
For it knows no rest, but is like the quest of her rivers that seek the sea.
Upward and on she presses with a zeal no check may rein,
With a strength no shock may shatter while her seasons wake and wane;
Nerved of her stirring stories of the deeds and the deaths of men,
She wins for greater glories till the lapse of human ken.
Her breath is sweet of the southland and the fragile jasmine blows,
On her brow is the excellent whiteness of still Sierra snows,
And her feet are shod with the mosses of the murmurous woodland ways,
And her head is crowned and her temples bound by fillets of slender maize:
As the wild Atlantic fearless, as the hushed Pacific calm,
She rules her rugged hilltops and her breathless groves of palm;
And, whether in waste or city, with freedom her shining shield,
She is queen by right of her splendid might and the love her children yield.
And on through the unrun ages, through stormy and sunlit days,
Still shall the crescent pages of history sing her praise,
As by ways of strife and burden to the goal of strife's surcease
She pursues the priceless guerdon, the dawn of a deathless peace—
The wise and wonderful mother of states and states to be,
Guarded and well defended of the sons who made her free,
Of the sons who learned to love her, and of loving her learned to die
For the flag of the White Republic, the gift of the Lord Most High!
New York, 1897.