Sing of happier themes, O many-voiced epic,
Sing how the ages, like thrifty husbandmen, winnow the creeds of men,
And leave only faith and love and truth.
Sing of the Puritan's nobler nature,
Fathomless as the forests he felled,
Irresistible as the winds that blow.
His trenchant conviction was but the somber bulwark
Which guarded his pure ideal.
Resolute by the communion board he stood,
And after solemn prayer solemnly cancelled
And abolished the divine right of kings
And declared the holy rights of man.
Prophet and toiler, yearning for other worlds, yet wise in this;
Scornful of earthly empire and brooding on death,
Yet wrestling life out of the wilderness
And laying stone on stone the foundation of a temporal state!
I see him standing at his cabin-door at eventide
With dreaming, fearless eyes gazing at sunset hills;
In his prophetic sight Liberty, like a bride,
Hasteth to meet her lord, the westward-going man!
Even as he saw the citadel of Heaven,
He beheld an earthly state divinely fair and just.
Mystic and statesman, maker of homes,
Strengthened by the primal law of toil,
And schooled by monarch-made injustices,
He carried the covenant of liberty with fire and sword,
And laid a rich state on frugality!
Many republics have sprung into being,
Full-grown, equipped with theories forged in reason;
All, all have fallen in a single night;
But to the wise, fire-hardened Puritan
Democracy was not a blaze of glory
To crackle for an hour and be quenched out
By the first gust that blows across the world.
I see him standing at his cabin-door,
And all his dreams are true as when he dreamed them;
But only shall they be fulfilled if we
Are mindful of the toil that gave him power,
Are brave to dare a wilderness of wrong;
So long shall Nature nourish us and Spring
Throw riches in the lap of man
As we beget no wasteful, weak-handed generations,
But bend us to the fruitful earth in toil.
Beyond the wall a new-plowed field lies steaming in the sun,
And down the road a merry group of children
Run toward the village school.

Hear, O hear! In the historian walls
Rises the beat and the tumult of the struggle for freedom.
Sacred, blood-stained walls, your peaceful front
Sheltered the fateful fires of Lexington;
Builded to fence green fields and keep the herds at pasture,
Ye became the frowning breastworks of stern battle;
Lowly boundaries of the freeman's farm,
Ye grew the rampart of a land at war;
And still ye cross the centuries
Between the ages of monarchs and the age
When farmers in their fields are kings.
From the Revolution the young Republic emerged,
She mounted up as on the wings of the eagle,
She ran and was not weary, and all the children of the world
Joined her and followed her shining path.
But ever as she ran, above her lifted head
Darkened the monster cloud of slavery.
Hark! In the walls, amid voices of prayer and of triumph,
I hear the clank of manacles and the ominous mutterings of bondsmen!
At Gettysburg, our Golgotha, the sons of the fathers
Poured their blood to wash out a nation's shame.
Cleansed by tribulation and atonement,
The broken nation rose from her knees,
And with hope reborn in her heart set forth again
Upon the open road to ideal democracy.