 | The poems and prose writings of Sumner Lincoln Fairfield |  |
Awed yet untrembling, Pansa calm replied.
“Ye hear no thunder—but Destruction's howl!
Ye see no lightning—but the lava glare
Of desolation sweeping o'er your pride!
Death is beneath, around, above, within
All who exult to inflict it on my heart,
And ye must meet it, fly when, where ye will,
For in the madness of your cruelties
Ye have delayed till every hope is dead.
Let the doom come! our faiths will soon be tried.
Gigantic spectres from their shadowy thrones,
With ghastly smiles to welcome ye, arise.
The Pharaohs and Ptolemies uplift
Their glimmering sceptres o'er thee—bidding all
Bare their dark bosoms to the Omniscient God:
And every strange and horrid mythos waits
To fold ye in the terrors of its dreams.
—For thee, proud Prætor! throned on human hearts
And warded by thy cohorts from the arm
Of violated virtue and spurned Right,
And suffering's madness—though thy regal tomb
Cepolline proudly stand, thy scattered dust
Shall never sleep within it; years shall fade
And nations perish and ten thousand kings,
With all their thrice ten thousand victories,
Rest in oblivion, and the very earth
Change with the changes of her children, yet
The empty mansion of thy vain renown
Shall stand that generations unconceived
May ask the deeds of him who was cast out
By vengeance from his father's sepulchres!”
“Ye hear no thunder—but Destruction's howl!
Ye see no lightning—but the lava glare
Of desolation sweeping o'er your pride!
Death is beneath, around, above, within
All who exult to inflict it on my heart,
And ye must meet it, fly when, where ye will,
For in the madness of your cruelties
Ye have delayed till every hope is dead.
Let the doom come! our faiths will soon be tried.
Gigantic spectres from their shadowy thrones,
With ghastly smiles to welcome ye, arise.
The Pharaohs and Ptolemies uplift
Their glimmering sceptres o'er thee—bidding all
Bare their dark bosoms to the Omniscient God:
And every strange and horrid mythos waits
To fold ye in the terrors of its dreams.
—For thee, proud Prætor! throned on human hearts
And warded by thy cohorts from the arm
Of violated virtue and spurned Right,
And suffering's madness—though thy regal tomb
140
Shall never sleep within it; years shall fade
And nations perish and ten thousand kings,
With all their thrice ten thousand victories,
Rest in oblivion, and the very earth
Change with the changes of her children, yet
The empty mansion of thy vain renown
Shall stand that generations unconceived
May ask the deeds of him who was cast out
By vengeance from his father's sepulchres!”
| The poems and prose writings of Sumner Lincoln Fairfield | |