THREE MEMORIAL POEMS
'Coscienza fusca
O della propria o dell' altrui vergogna
Pur sentira la tua parola brusca.'
If I let fall a word of bitter mirth
When public shames more shameful pardon won,
Some have misjudged me, and my service done,
If small, yet faithful, deemed of little worth:
Through veins that drew their life from Western earth
Two hundred years and more my blood hath run
In no polluted course from sire to son;
And thus was I predestined ere my birth
To love the soil wherewith my fibres own
Instinctive sympathies; yet love it so
As honor would, nor lightly to dethrone
Judgment, the stamp of manhood, nor forego
The son's right to a mother dearer grown
With growing knowledge and more chaste than snow.
* * * * *
To
E.L. GODKIN,
IN CORDIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS EMINENT SERVICE IN HEIGHTENING AND
PURIFYING THE TONE OF OUR POLITICAL THOUGHT,
These Three Poems
ARE DEDICATED.
* * * * *
*** Readers, it is hoped, will remember that, by his Ode at the Harvard
Commemoration, the author had precluded himself from many of the natural
outlets of thought and feeling common to such occasions as are
celebrated in these poems.
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