University of Virginia Library

VII

Even should She perish, stunned,
Why for this patch of ground
While vintaged suns are blithe
And dancing in the glass,
Now should it come to pass
That men must drop before the scythe,
Bound by the same religion as the grass?
What, after all, is France?
'Tis she who since Rome's wane
Hath been man's leader these two thousand years.
She, always first to bear the throe
Europe must after undergo,
Who beneath the centralising touch of pain
Winces into control by brain—
Her very hurts become for her an eye—
Who first among the nations seems to attain
Most near to conscious personality;
Until her rudest sea-washt frontier-part
Is yet repeated at her heart,
And something of her wingèd whole
Glass'd upon every Pyrenean herdboy's soul.
She, who at Gergovia
Rallying the bare clans of the plaided Gael,
Alone defeated the great Caesar's dint;
She, who at Alesia
Massed on her long green mountain's table head,
Took for all time the noble Caesar's print
Of valour rein'd, and wisdom humanised,
And conquest by compassion fortified.
Steadfastly to diffuse
Her simple hearth-gods use
She to expanding thought from Hellas wins,
And, beside the freedom she extols,
She to imagine law for souls
Through the Roman and the Christian disciplines;
Slow pinnacle by feudal pinnacle
Hath laboured ages without stint
To make the many-chambered habitation
Of her exalted spirit swell,
And by many an anchoret's faint-candled cell,
Or flame-lit vestal, like her vestal Joan,
Hath from the Alban mount brought down
Into your wild green commonwealth of trees
The sacred fire familial,
And let it on her nation's altar dwell
To raise for mother and child a roof sublime.