"Blood crieth from the ground! where is thy brother?"
If thus upon the living God doth set the seal
Of condemnation for the false witnessing
How will he smite the lips of those who steal
His covering from the dead, and fill the sacred spring
Of memory, with the debris of their lives;
Mixing, what God has kindly torn apart,
And making null, the severence he strives,
Between the naked soul, and sin encumbered heart!

The gem was melted, and his life went out
In unobtrusive secrecy, and all
That he brought with him, passed the silent way
Into eternity, beyond recall.
He chose no sponsor to renew his place
But gave them back to Nature, as he found;
Yet was his impress fastened on the race,
And every morn they gathered at the mound,
For many after years, till they had grown
A nation strong in numbers, and had thrown
The seeds of generation far and wide,
And found the latent valleys without guide.
The lakes are made a tribute to their spoil,
And all the riches of the virgin soil
Were tested by those hardy argonauts of old;
And though they sought no fleece of shining gold,
They penetrated all the wilderness
That lay unclaimed before them to possess.

God drops no nobler anchorage on earth,
Than those who mold a nation, and a name;
Whose travail in the wilderness gives birth
To some great epoch, without thought of fame.
The pioneers of empire, for all time,
Are gold-dust, from the placers of our homes--
The surface croppings from a nation's prime,
The mellow acre of the richest loams.
They overgrow the boundaries of life,
And push the horizon far out in space.
With lethargy they wage a ceaseless strife,
And with the whirling earth, they keep their pace.
All honor to the soul who sets his stake
Where human kind have never trenched before;
Where only God his thunders o'er it shake,
And solitude shall murmur, "nevermore."
Such men are sovereigns, though they grasp no crown,
And raise no jewelled scepter in the hand;
Yet are they Princes, in their bronze and brown,