God! thou art merciful—the wintry storm,
The cloud that pours the thunder from its womb,
But show the sterner grandeur of thy form;
The lightnings glancing through the midnight
gloom,
To Faith's raised eye as calm, as lovely come,
As splendors of the autumnal evening star,
As roses shaken by the breeze's plume,
When like cool incense comes the dewy air,
And on the golden wave the sunset burns afar.
III.
God! thou art mighty!—at thy footstool bound,
Lie gazing to thee Chance, and Life, and Death;
Nor in the Angel-circle flaming round,
Nor in the million worlds that blaze beneath
Is one that can withstand thy wrath's hot breath—
Woe in thy frown—in thy smile, victory!
Hear my last prayer—I ask no mortal wreath;
Let but these eyes my rescued country see,
Then take my spirit, All-Omnipotent, to thee.
IV.
Now for the fight—now for the cannon-peal—
Forward—through blood and toil, and cloud and
fire!
Glorious the shout, the shock, the crash of steel,
The volley's roll, the rocket's blasting spire;
They shake—like broken waves their squares
retire,—
On, them, hussars!—now give them rein and heel;
Think of the orphaned child, the murdered sire:—
Earth cries for blood—in thunder on them wheel!
This hour to Europe's fate shall set the triumph seal.
KARL THEODORE KORNER.
SELF-RELIANCE.
1. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what THEY thought.
2. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
3. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.