Panama and Other Poems Narrative and Occasional :: :: University of Virginia Library

Sirs, now the heat of party strife is cooled,
For mightier issues leisure has arrived;
The large Imperial peril deeper calls.
Rome reeled and fell; but from a different foe;
We dread no horde barbaric, and by loot
From forests multitudinously lured,
With dreadful trample hollowing the ground,
Hurled out of leafy gloom on cities bright;
No! but a timed and calculated Force,
Unanimous, unhasting and unresting,
Sleepless, no moment, and no figure lost,
With silent thunder and with lightning veiled.
The German hath no vengeance he would wreak;
He at excluded bay and ocean chafes,
In sighing sullen unexpanded power,
With difficulty labouring for breath;
And groans with teeming loins for grander fields.
An island, solitary intercepts;

World-destiny, no less, the “Cause of War.”
And come it soon or late, yet it will come.
Rome reeled and fell: she rotted from within,
Languid by luxury, by vice exposed;
We are not sunk into that sensual slush.
Yet who shall say, if on the final clash,
And all this potent people half-adream,
Apathy prove not an Imperial vice?