No mystic sentence will they bear again,
Which, sagely spelled, might ward a nation's doom;
But we have left us still some god-like men,
And some great voices pleading from the tomb.
If we would heed them, they might save us yet,
Call up some gleams of manhood in our breasts,
Truth, valor, justice, teach us to forget
In a grand cause our selfish interests.
But we have fallen on evil times indeed,
When public faith is but the common shame,
And private morals held an idiot's creed,
And old-world honesty an empty name.
And lust, and greed, and gain are all our arts!
The simple lessons which our father's taught
Are scorned and jeered at; in our sordid marts
We sell the faith for which they toiled and fought.
Each jostling each in the mad strife for gold,
The weaker trampled by the unrecking throng
Friends, honor, country lost, betrayed, or sold,
And lying blasphemies on every tongue.
Cant for religion, sounding words for truth,
Fraud leads to fortune, gelt for guilt atones,
No care for hoary age or tender youth,
For widows' tears or helpless orphans' groans.
The people rage, and work their own wild will,
They stone the prophets, drag their highest down,
And as they smite, with savage folly still
Smile at their work, those dead eyes wear no frown.
The sage of "Drainfield"[1] tills a barren soil,
And reaps no harvest where he sowed the seed,
He has but exile for long years of toil;
Nor voice in council, though his children bleed.
And never more shall "Redcliffs"[2] oaks rejoice,
Now bowed with grief above their master's bier;
Faction and party stilled that mighty voice,
Which yet could teach us wisdom, could we hear.
And "Woodland's"[3] harp is mute: the gray, old man
Broods by his lonely hearth and weaves no song;
Or, if he sing, the note is sad and wan,
Like the pale face of one who's suffered long.