The Morn That Breaks Its Heart Of Gold

From an ode "In Commemoration of the Founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony."     The morn that breaks its heart of gold     Above the purple hills;     The eve, that spills     Its nautilus splendor where the sea is rolled;     The night, that leads the vast procession in     Of stars and dreams, -     The beauty that shall never die or pass: -     The winds, that spin     Of rain the misty mantles of the grass,     And thunder raiment of the mountain-streams;     The sunbeams, penciling with gold the dusk     Green cowls of ancient woods;     The shadows, thridding, veiled with musk,     The moon-pathed solitudes,     Call to my Fancy, saying, "Follow! follow!"     Till, following, I see, -     Fair as a cascade in a rainbowed hollow, -     A dream, a shape, take form,     Clad on with every charm, -     The vision of that Ideality,     Which lured the pioneer in wood and hill,     And beckoned him from earth and sky;     The dream that cannot die,     Their children's children did fulfill,     In stone and iron and wood,     Out of the solitude,     And by a stalwart act     Create a mighty fact -     A Nation, now that stands     Clad on with hope and beauty, strength and song,     Eternal, young and strong,     Planting her heel on wrong,     Her starry banner in triumphant hands....     Within her face the rose     Of Alleghany dawns;     Limbed with Alaskan snows,     Floridian starlight in her eyes, -     Eyes stern as steel yet tender as a fawn's, -     And in her hair     The rapture of her rivers; and the dare,     As perishless as truth,     That o'er the crags of her Sierras flies,     Urging the eagle ardor through her veins,     Behold her where,     Around her radiant youth,     The spirits of the cataracts and plains,     The genii of the floods and forests, meet,     In rainbow mists circling her brow and feet:     The forces vast that sit     In session round her; powers paraclete,     That guard her presence; awful forms and fair,     Making secure her place;     Guiding her surely as the worlds through space     Do laws sidereal; edicts, thunder-lit,     Of skyed eternity, in splendor borne     On planetary wings of night and morn.     *             *             *             *             *     From her high place she sees     Her long procession of accomplished acts,     Cloud-winged refulgences     Of thoughts in steel and stone, of marble dreams,     Lift up tremendous battlements,     Sun-blinding, built of facts;     While in her soul she seems,     Listening, to hear, as from innumerable tents,     onian thunder, wonder, and applause     Of all the heroic ages that are gone;     Feeling secure     That, as her Past, her Future shall endure,     As did her Cause     When redly broke the dawn     Of fierce rebellion, and, beneath its star,     The firmaments of war     Poured down infernal rain,     And North and South lay bleeding mid their slain.     And now, no less, shall her great Cause prevail,     More so in peace than war,     Through the thrilled wire and electric rail,     Carrying her message far:     Shaping her dream     Within the brain of steam,     That, with a myriad hands,     Labors unceasingly, and knits her lands     In firmer union; joining plain and stream     With steel; and binding shore to shore     With bands of iron; - nerves and arteries,     Along whose adamant forever pour     Her concrete thoughts, her tireless energies.