Yet whatsoever be our bondage here,
All have two portals to the phantom sphere.
What hath not glided through those gates that ope
Beyond the Hour, to MEMORY or to HOPE!
Give Youth the Garden,--still it soars above,
Seeks some far glory, some diviner love.
Place Age amidst the Golgotha,--its eyes
Still quit the graves, to rest upon the skies;
And while the dust, unheeded, moulders there,
Track some lost angel through cerulean air.

Lo! where the Austrian binds, with formal chain,
The crownless son of earth's last Charlemagne,--
Him, at whose birth laughed all the violet vales
(While yet unfallen stood thy sovereign star,
O Lucifer of nations). Hark, the gales
Swell with the shout from all the hosts, whose war
Rended the Alps, and crimsoned Memphian Nile,--
"Way for the coming of the Conqueror's Son:
Woe to the Merchant-Carthage of the Isle!
Woe to the Scythian ice-world of the Don!
O Thunder Lord, thy Lemnian bolts prepare,
The Eagle's eyry hath its eagle heir!"
Hark, at that shout from north to south, gray Power
Quails on its weak, hereditary thrones;
And widowed mothers prophesy the hour
Of future carnage to their cradled sons.
What! shall our race to blood be thus consigned,
And Ate claim an heirloom in mankind?
Are these red lots unshaken in the urn?