 | The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman |  |
III
VESTIGIA RETRORSUM
Gone the Arcadian age,When, from his hillside hermitage
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At ease upon a royal road,
And found the outer regions all they seem
In Youth's prophetic dream.
The graduate took his station then
By right, a ruler among men:
Courtly the three estates, and sure;
The bar, the bench, the pulpit, pure;
No cosmic doubts arose, to vex
The preacher's heart, his faith perplex.
Content in ancient paths he trod,
Nor searched beyond his Book for God.
Great virtue lurked in many a saw
And in the doctor's Latin lay;
Men thought, lived, died, in the appointed way.
Yet eloquence was slave to law,
And law to right: the statesman sought
A patriot's fame, and served his land, unbought,
And bore erect his front, and held his oath in awe.
| The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman | |