Ah, friends! beneath your real skies
The actor's short-lived triumph dies:
On that broad stage, of empire won
Whose footlights were the setting sun,
Whose flats a distant background rose
In trackless peaks of endless snows;
Here genius bows, and talent waits
To copy that but One creates.
Your shifting scenes: the league of sand,
An avenue by ocean spanned;
The narrow beach of straggling tents,
A mile of stately monuments;
Your standard, lo! a flag unfurled,
Whose clinging folds clasp half the world,—
This is your drama, built on facts,
With "twenty years between the acts."
One moment more: if here we raise
The oft-sung hymn of local praise,
Before the curtain facts must sway;
Here waits the moral of your play.
Glassed in the poet's thought, you view
What money can, yet cannot do;
The faith that soars, the deeds that shine,
Above the gold that builds the shrine.
And oh! when others take our place,
And Earth's green curtain hides our face,
Ere on the stage, so silent now,
The last new hero makes his bow:
So may our deeds, recalled once more
In Memory's sweet but brief encore,
Down all the circling ages run,
With the world's plaudit of "Well done!"
The Lost Galleon.
In sixteen hundred and forty-one,
The regular yearly galleon,
Laden with odorous gums and spice,
India cottons and India rice,
And the richest silks of far Cathay,
Was due at Acapulco Bay.
Due she was, and over-due,—
Galleon, merchandise, and crew,
Creeping along through rain and shine,
Through the tropics, under the line.
The trains were waiting outside the walls,
The wives of sailors thronged the town,
The traders sat by their empty stalls,
And the viceroy himself came down;
The bells in the tower were all a-trip,
Te Deums were on each father's lip,
The limes were ripening in the sun
For the sick of the coming galleon.
All in vain. Weeks passed away,
And yet no galleon saw the bay:
India goods advanced in price;
The governor missed his favorite spice;
The señoritas mourned for sandal,
And the famous cottons of Coromandel;
And some for an absent lover lost,
And one for a husband,—Donna Julia,
Wife of the captain, tempest-tossed,
In circumstances so peculiar:
Even the fathers, unawares,
Grumbled a little at their prayers;
And all along the coast that year
Votive candles were scarce and dear.