Home of Freedom, hope of millions born and slain and yet to be,
Shall the spirit of the bondless, caught from heaven, fail in thee?
Shall the watching world behold thee falling from thy starry height?
Like a meteor, in thine ending leaving only darker night?
Oh! my kinsmen, Oh! my brothers—fellow-heirs of Saxon hearts,
Lo the Eagle quits his eyrie swifter than a swallow darts,
And the lurid flame of battle burns within his angry eye,
Glowing like a living ember cast in vengeance from the sky.
At thy hearth a foe has risen, fiercer yet to burn and kill,
That he was thy chosen brother—friend no more, but brother still;
For the bitter tide of hatred deeper runs and fiercer grows,
As the pleading voice of Nature addeth self-reproach to blows.
Strike! and in the ghastly horrors of a fratricidal war,
Learn the folly of your wanderings from the guiding Northern Star;
What were all your gains and glories, to creation's fatal loss
When ye crucified your Freedom on the cruel Southern Cross?
Oh! my brothers narrow-sighted—Oh! my brothers slow to hear
What the phantoms of the fallen ever whisper in the ear;
God is just, and from the ruins of the temple rent in twain
Rises up the invocation of a warning breathed in vain.
All thy pillars reel around thee from the fury of the blow,
And the fires upon thine altars fade and flicker to and fro;
Call the vigor of thy manhood into arms from head to foot,
Strike! and in thy strife with error let the blow be at the root.
So thy war shall wear the glory of a purpose to refine
From the dross of early folly all the honor that is thine;
So thine arms shall gather friendship to the standard of a cause
Blending in its grand approval British hearts and British laws.
Form thy heroes into armies from the mart and from the field,
And their ranks shall stretch around thee in a bristling, living shield;
Take the loyal beggar's offer; for the war whose cause is just
Breathes the soul of noblest daring into forms of meanest dust.