Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/129

1866.] Devote thy memory to scorn and shame,

And scoff at the pale, powerless thing thou art.

And they who ruled in thine imperial name,

Subdued, and standing sullenly apart,

Scowl at the hands that overthrew thy reign,

And shattered at a blow the prisoner's chain.

Well was thy doom deserved; thou didst not spare

Life's tenderest ties, but cruelly didst part

Husband and wife, and from the mother's heart

Didst wrest her children, deaf to shriek and prayer;

Thy inner lair became

The haunt of guilty shame;

Thy lash dropped blood; the murderer, at thy side,

Showed his red hands, nor feared the vengeance due.

Thou didst sow earth with crimes, and, far and wide,

A harvest of uncounted miseries grew,

Until the measure of thy sins at last

Was full, and then the avenging bolt was cast.

Go then, accursed of God, and take thy place

With baleful memories of the elder time,

With many a wasting pest, and nameless crime,

And bloody war that thinned the human race;

With the Black Death, whose way

Through wailing cities lay,

Worship of Moloch, tyrannies that built

The Pyramids, and cruel creeds that taught

To avenge a fancied guilt by deeper guilt,—

Death at the stake to those that held them not.

Lo, the foul phantoms, silent in the gloom

Of the flown ages, part to yield thee room.

I see the better years that hasten by

Carry thee back into that shadowy past,

Where, in the dusty spaces, void and vast,

The graves of those whom thou hast murdered lie.

The slave-pen, through whose door

Thy victims pass no more,

Is there, and there shall the grim block remain

At which the slave was sold; while at thy feet

Scourges and engines of restraint and pain

Moulder and rust by thine eternal seat.

There, 'mid the symbols that proclaim thy crimes,

Dwell thou, a warning to the coming times.