If these, O lands of America, are indeed the prizes,
the determinations of your soul, be it so. But behold the cost, and
already specimens of the cost. Thought you greatness was to ripen
for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you
must conquer it through ages, centuries--must pay for it with a
proportionate price. For you too, as for all lands, the struggle, the
traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of
prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of
faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless
need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births, new
projections and invigorations of ideas and men.
Yet I have dream'd, merged in that hidden-tangled problem of our fate,
whose long unraveling stretches mysteriously through time--dream'd
out, portray'd, hinted already--a little or a larger band--a band
of brave and true, unprecedented yet--arm'd and equipt at every
point--the members separated, it may be, by different dates and
States, or south, or north, or east, or west--Pacific, Atlantic,
Southern, Canadian--a year, a century here, and other centuries
there--but always one, compact in soul, conscience-conserving,
God-inculcating, inspirid achievers, not only in literature, the
greatest art, but achievers in all art--a new, undying order,
dynasty, from age to age transmitted--a band, a class, at least as
fit to cope with current years, our dangers, needs, as those who, for
their times, so long, so well, in armor or in cowl, upheld and made
illustrious, that far-back feudal, priestly world.
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