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288 When liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go,

It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.

When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs,

And when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth,

Then only shall liberty or the idea of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth,

And the infidel come into full possession.

Then courage European revolter, revoltress!

For till all ceases neither must you cease.

I do not know what you are for, (I do not know what I am for myself, nor what any thing is for,)

But I will search carefully for it even in being foil'd,

In defeat, poverty, misconception, imprisonment—for they too are great.

Did we think victory great?

So it is—but now it seems to me, when it cannot be helped, that defeat is great,

And that death and dismay are great. 



ten thousand years before these States, and many times ten thousand years before these States,

Garner'd clusters of ages that men and women like us grew up and travel'd their course and pass'd on,

What vast-built cities, what orderly republics, what pastoral tribes and nomads,

What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others,

What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions,

What sort of marriage, what costumes, what physiology and phrenology,

What of liberty and slavery among them, what they thought of death and the soul,

Who were witty and wise, who beautiful and poetic, who brutish and undeveloped,

Not a mark, not a record remains—and yet all remains.

O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more than we are for nothing, 