Page:Canadian poems of the great war.djvu/252

 Horatio Wallace

As leaving you to judgment, Time shall doom you- Shall doom you with the great and final sentence: Their works are evil, and they shall not stand; Blot out their line, erase their infamy, Yea, save for warning, let their memory die! For we believe, and trust in God, believing, There is a power of goodness in the world, Even in the victims of your mad bewitchments, A power of light, and of the glory of it, A hat may not be o ercome by any evil, Though mailed in proof and armed from lowest hell.

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��BRITAIN

HERE was a Britain once, who stood alone Gainst a leagued world, and won ; and shall she fail, When round her all the sanctities of earth, The fervid dreams, the heavenward fantasies, The grace and kindness of the enlarging time, And Love s sole self, the vision of them all, In one clenched phalanx of invincible power Stand for the right? Doubly she is inspired By memory and desire; her mighty dead Call from their graves, and her eternal star Beacons the gracious goal.

Freedom lie dead?

Never! And, bending to her mighty task The sinewed strength of all her centuries She, with the pillars of that Godless house Gripped right and left, shall wrench them to their fall; A Samson s triumph with no Samson s fate, Striving her mightiest and her uttermost. And she shall win. If she should fail, the heaVen Were emptied of the hope of man s desire, Made blank with slavery ; body, mind and spirit Subdued to shameful bondage. She ll not fail.

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