Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/14

4 I lift the lone notes of my native song,

And thee implore, and thy immortal strength

Which turns the breath of man to adamant;

Now, as when first prophet and sibyl sang

Empire, and tribes gone forth, and rising fates,

And with dominion thou didst equal move,

Watch where far down the world a later race,

Rimmed round about with vast discovery,

Founds milder power, and shapes of sweet, new speech

The syllables of slow-divulging time;

Here raise aloft the world's great hope anew,

Proclaiming man, who lives in all men's lives,

What is endures, what shall be brings! O send

Omnipotently forth thy word where now

He sows the western edges of the world

With wisdom and delight and love's increase,

Till earth shall lift one harvest from one field,

Reaped by one race that shall one Father own,

Eat at one table, sleep beside one hearth,

Confederate in blessèd unities,

One law, one faith, and one prosperity,

One labor looking to one end divine:

So fair a star hangs in our western skies.

Wherefore I also toil. Hear now, who will,

How first, how last, I knew man's soul in me