Be with us while the New World greets
The Old World thronging all its streets,
Unveiling all the triumphs won
By art or toil beneath the sun;
And unto common good ordain
This rivalship of hand and brain.

Thou, who hast here in concord furled
The war flags of a gathered world,"
Beneath our Western skies fulfil
The Orient's mission of good-will,

And freighted with love's Golden Fleece,
Send back its Argonauts of peace.8

For art and labor met in truce,

For beauty made the bride of use,

We thank Thee; but, withal, we crave
The austere virtues strong to save,
The honor proof to place or gold,
The manhood never bought nor sold!

Oh make Thou us, through centuries long,
In peace secure, in justice strong;

Around our gift of freedom draw
The safeguards of Thy righteous law:
And, cast in some diviner mould,

Let the new cycle shame the old!

The Bartholdi Statue

The land, that, from the rule of kings,
In freeing us, itself made free,

Our Old World Sister, to us brings

Her sculptured Dream of Liberty:

Unlike the shapes on Egypt's sands
Uplifted by the toil-worn slave,
On Freedom's soil with freemen's hands
We rear the symbol free hands gave.

O France, the beautiful! to thee

Once more a debt of love we owe:
In peace beneath thy Colors Three,
We hail a later Rochambeau!1

Rise, stately Symbol! holding forth
Thy light and hope to all who sit
In chains and darkness! Belt the earth
With watch-fires from thy torch uplit!

Reveal the primal mandate still

Which Chaos heard and ceased to be,
Trace on mid-air th' Eternal Will

In signs of fire: "Let man be free!"

Shine far, shine free, a guiding light

To Reason's ways and Virtue's aim,
A lightning-flash the wretch to smite
Who shields his license with thy name!

1886, 1888

Burning Drift-Wood2

Before my drift-wood fire I sit,
And see, with every waif I burn,
Old dreams and fancies coloring it,
And folly's unlaid ghosts return.

O ships of mine, whose swift keels cleft
The enchanted sea on which they sailed,
Are these poor fragments only left

Of vain desires and hopes that failed?

Did I not watch from them the light
Of sunset on my towers in Spain,

1. Comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807),
general in command of a French force
sent to the aid of the Americans, as-
sisted Washington in the defeat of
Cornwallis at Yorktown (1781) while

5

10

a French fleet prevented British escape by sea, thus ending the Revolutionary War.

2. This poem appeared in Whittier's last volume, At Sundown (1890).

And see, far off, uploom in sight
The Fortunate Isles I might not gain?

Did sudden lift of fog reveal

Arcadia's vales of song and spring,
And did I pass, with grazing keel,

The rocks whereon the sirens sing?
Have I not drifted hard upon

The unmapped regions lost to man,
The cloud-pitched tents of Prester John,3
The palace domes of Kubla Khan?+

Did land winds blow from jasmine flowers,
Where Youth the ageless Fountain fills?
Did Love make sign from rose blown bowers,
And gold from Eldorado's hills?

Alas! the gallant ships that sailed

On blind Adventure's errand sent,
Howe'er they laid their courses, failed

To reach the haven of Content.

And of my ventures, those alone

Which Love had freighted, safely sped,
Seeking a good beyond my own,
By clear-eyed Duty piloted.

O mariners, hoping still to meet
The luck Arabian voyagers met,
And find in Bagdad's moonlit street,
Haroun al Raschide walking yet,

Take with you, on your Sea of Dreams,
The fair, fond fancies dear to youth.
I turn from all that only seems,

And seek the sober grounds of truth.

What matter that it is not May,

That birds have flown, and trees are bare,
That darker grows the shortening day,

And colder blows the wintry air!

The wrecks of passion and desire, The castles I no more rebuild, 3. A legendary priest and king of the Middle Ages, supposed to be ruler of a land in eastern Africa; celebrated in English lays and ballads.

4. The words echo Coleridge's poem on Kubla Khan (1216-1294), fabulous

founder of a Mongol dynasty in western China.

5. "The golden"; a legendary South American kingdom, abounding in treas

ure.

6. In the Arabian Nights, the fabulous caliph of Bagdad.

May fitly feed my drift-wood fire,

And warm the hands that age has chilled.

Whatever perished with my ships,

I only know the best remains;
A song of praise is on my lips

For losses which are now my gains.

Heap high my hearth! No worth is lost;
No wisdom with the folly dies.
Burn on, poor shreds, your holocaust
Shall be my evening sacrifice!

Far more than all I dared to dream,
Unsought before my door I see;

On wings of fire and steeds of steam
The world's great wonders come to me,
And holier signs, unmarked before,

Of Love to seek and Power to save,-
The righting of the wronged and poor,
The man evolving from the slave;
And life, no longer chance or fate,

Safe in the gracious Fatherhood.
I fold o'er-wearied hands and wait,
In full assurance of the good.
And well the waiting time must be,

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55

60

65

Though brief or long its granted days,

70

If Faith and Hope and Charity'

Sit by my evening hearth-fire's blaze.

And with them, friends whom Heaven has spared,

Whose love my heart has comforted,