The Fading Vision

The vision fades - dome, pinnacle and tower,             All the white beauty of the lake-side dream,             The artist's ideal, the poet's theme         Vanish away. Yet for no fleeting hour         Was this proud fabric raised. The crumbling wall             Entombs not memory's treasure, and we hold             This truth dear as the miser his loved gold,         Dome, pinnacle and tower cannot fall.         No marvel this, that memory holds fast             Such beauty, passing beauty seen before,             The grace and charm of every clime and shore,         Strength of today, the glories of the past,         All met in one great whole - for not alone             Man's hand the wonder wrought, but soaring high             His spirit, like the bird that cleaves the sky,         Knew naught of obstacle from zone to zone.         Deathless his work. Age shall repeat to age             The story of the city by the Lake.             And as the waves that on the near sands break         Reach far-off shores, so on the pictured page         Throughout remotest time, serene in pride,             Wearing her crown of glory, shall be seen             Stately and fair, Chicago, Western queen,         With all the Nations gathered at her side.         Gladly they met, each teaching and each taught,             Light-skinned or dark-skinned from the West or East.             Peoples unlike, as at a loving feast,         Distant no more, united in a thought.         Columbia! this thy lesson, learn it well -             The comity of Nations; this the plan             Of God from time's first dawn, that man with man,         Bound in one brotherhood in peace should dwell.         Great Voyager, whose caravels outsped             Man's swiftest fancy in those earlier days!             If, looking far beyond the curving bays         Of this new world thy glowing spirit read         That here there stretched a mighty continent             Where a sure haven for mankind should be,             Small didst thou count thy peril on the sea,         Well knowing what thy sufferings had meant.         For it was thine to turn toward the West             The worn old-world, and westward as the star             Of Power moves, nor tyranny nor war         Its fires sustains - it shines for the oppressed.         The vision fades - dome, pinnacle and tower -             Yet fades not like the substance of a dream -             Nation to Nation, State to State shall seem         Drawn to each other closer through its power.          1893