Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/177

MATER CORONATA II

The elements that buffet man decree

His lustihood prevailing to the end;

The free air foreordains him to be free;—

Their stern persistency

The ages to his resolute spirit lend.

III

So rose our Academe since that far day

When reverently the grave forefathers came,

In council by the shoal ancestral bay,

To speak the word,—to pray,—

To found the enduring shrine without a name.

IV

Ye, at the witchery of whose golden wand

New cloisters rise to splendor in a night,—

Find here your model! Here the barriers stand

That were not made to hand,

That have the puissance Time confers aright.

V

Born with the exit of that iron age

When Nova Anglia to New-England grew,

Learning's new child put up a hermitage,

Whereof no godly mage

As from a mount the boundaries foreknew;

VI

No oracle betokened the obscure

Grim years encountering which the elders bowed,

Yet knew not faintness nor discomfiture,

But set the buttress sure

That should upstay these tabernacles proud;

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