My Mind and its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays

Power of the sweeping wing!
And wasting sand!
Lord of the healing breath!
And spoiling hand!
Whose lengthened fingers fling
The viewless shafts of death!
Beneath whose tread the crumbling marble lies,
From whose vast hoard unbounded empires rise:
Yet rise to fall!
While to thy sway and thee
The sometime victor bends his conquered knee,
And feels his palsied heart obey thy call;
Whose grasp can shake the tyrant from his throne,
And from his withering temples snatch the tarnished crown

Magician! whom all arts obey,
Now from thy wand is ruin hurled,
Now a rude outlaw gains imperial sway,
And a walled acre

Alluding to the well known origin of Rome.

awes the subject world.
Thy talisman could Egypt's pillars bow,
From their broad base her pyramids shall throw,
While all her faded laurels shade thy brow.

106

Egypt! from whom immortal hope

The Egyptians were the first who asserted the immortality of the soul; the belief of which was clearly indicated by the doctrine of the Metempsychosis.

arose,
Beneath whose orient ray,
Celestial science met the eye of day—
Where bursting wisdom dawned its earliest beam,
Ere on the margin of her worshipped stream
Like a new God the young Papyrus grew,
And taught instructed realms to lift the adoring view,
While all the arts on his smooth breast repose!
Egypt, where Alexander sleeps in dust,
Where great Sesotris

In all the countries subjugated by this extraordinary hero, he erected pillars or statues of himself with this inscription, “I Sesostris, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, subdued this country by the power of my arms;” and probably no conqueror has ever displayed so many monuments of victorious greatness.

rears his trophied bust.
A mouldering pageant and an empty name;
While the barbarian Turk her meads deflowers,
And the wild Arab mocks her murdered powers;
Assisting thee to blast her fading fame:
No more Osiris

Osiris, the inventor of the plough, was worshipped under the form of an Ox, whom they denominated the God Apis

guards those wasted plains,
No pean'd Isis

“I Isis, wife of king Osiris, am she, who found corn for the use of man.”

strews the golden grains!

Proud Xerxes wept to find
That, ere one fleeting century sunned mankind,
His million heroes to thy power must bow:
Vain man! with all thy treasured radiance shine,
Nerved with majestic strength—and graced with charms divine.

None could be compared to Xerxes in Strength—In Beauty—and in Stature. Gillies' Greece.

For the rough sea thy bonds prepare—
Bid thy frail vassals lash the angry air—
While thy delusive moments flow—
And the great conqueror arrests thy care,
Nor will his lifted scythe those vaunted honors spare!
Where is Palmyra's boast!
Where tower'd Zenobia's dome!
Where the Chaldean, Syrian, Grecian host!
Or where thy glorious freedom, LAURELLED Rome?
Ask their great founder, Time—
Whose plastic hand,
Where ignorance led his vagrant band,
In some unlettered clime,

107

Now bids the marble of the palace rise,
With glittering turrets to the bending skies,
Adorned with infant arts aspiring to their prime.
Even thus Columbia, o'er whose growing plains,
Chief of her choice, her Great Civilian

This merely required the name of John Adams, and is now rendered superfluous, by the previous notice of the Odes having been written during his presidency.

reigns;
Of guiding genius, and controlling hand,
Firm to resolve, and gentle to command:
Decided Patriot! Time for thee prepares
A crown, uncankered by the rust of years;
Haloed by stars, whose varying rays entwine:
The gift is glory, but the grace is thine.
While withering millions on far Europe's shore
Gaze on thy rights, and all their wrongs deplore;
From thee shall time the lettered precept give,
Instruction flow—they drink the stream and live.

O Virtue! sovereign of the gifted mind,
Though erring mortals may reject thy sway,
Those loved of heaven, the noblest of their kind,
Are thine, and thine the light that leads their way,
Opening on life's drear shades a MORNING RAY,—
Thee shall all ruling Time himself obey!

These Odes, with trifling alterations, are reprinted from a former publication: being first written during the presidency of the now retired patriot, John Adams.

University of Virginia Library

ODES TO TIME.

ODE 1.