 | The lion's cub |  |
OUR FATHERS.
Here where our fathers worshipped in the Past,And where their children worship now, we come,
With reverent spirit, as befits the place,
The house they builded for their heavenly needs,
On this green hill, two hundred years ago.
Averse from ceremonious forms and rites,
They left their dear, ancestral homes, the graves
Wherein the ashes of their dead reposed.
They crossed a thousand stormy leagues of sea,
Bearing the best of England in their breasts,
And planted the New World in the wilderness.
Masterful men, but narrow, quick to do
The work that seemed appointed to their hands;
Content with little pleasures, or with none;
Not troubled with unprofitable thoughts;
Of one thing sure—that God would judge them all.
Their sturdy virtues were the corner-stone
Whereon were set the pillars of the State.
Their lives were hard. They tilled the stubborn soil,
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Or ploughed the windy furrows of the deep,
Under the Pole Star or the Southern Cross,
Adventurous, resolute, their creed summed up
In the right to worship God in their own way,
And not as priests ordain. They had it here.
Here, where their marriage-vows were interchanged,
Their children were baptized, and where at last,
When the long pilgrimage of life was done,
The mourners bore their bodies. Graves were dug
On the green hillside, where their fathers slept,
And they were buried there with many tears,
With homely headstones, carved with cherubs' wings,
And under these the years of birth and death,
And pious texts of Scripture, which declared
That, dying in the Lord, the dead were blessed;
For there remains a rest for them, a house
Not built with hands, eternal in the heavens.
Such hope, such certainty, our fathers had;
Such hope, such certainty, such rest be ours.
| The lion's cub | |