After the deluge, the race of Noah repeoples the empty world, and the history of mankind begins anew in the Orient. Rome is built, and the Christian era dawns, and Rome falls under the feet of the barbarians. Then the enthusiasm of Christendom sweeps toward the East, in the repeated Crusades; and then, “after long years of twilight”, Dante, the sun of Italian civilization, rises; and at last comes the dream of another world, unknown to the eyes of elder times.
But between that and our shore roared diffuse Abysmal seas and fabulous hurricanes Which, thought on, blanched the faces of the bold; For the dread secret of the heavens was then The Western world. Yet on the Italian coasts A boy grew into manhood, in whose soul The instinct of the unknown continent burned. He saw in his prophetic mind depicted The opposite visage of the earth, and, turning With joyful defiance to the ocean, sailed Forth with two secret pilots, God and Genius. Last of the prophets, he returned in chains And glory.
In the New World are the traces, as in the Old, of a restless humanity, wandering from coast to coast, growing, building cities, and utterly vanishing. There are graves and ruins everywhere; and the poet's thought returns from these scenes of unstoried desolation, to follow again the course of man in the Old World annals. But here, also, he is lost in the confusion of man's advance and retirement, and he muses:
How many were the peoples? Where the trace Of their lost steps? Where the funereal fields In which they sleep? Go, ask the clouds of heaven How many bolts are hidden in their breasts, And when they shall be launched; and ask the path That they shall keep in the unfurrowed air. The peoples passed. Obscure as destiny, Forever stirred by secret hope, forever Waiting upon the promised mysteries, Unknowing God, that urged them, turning still To some kind star,--they swept o'er the sea-weed In unknown waters, fearless swam the course Of nameless rivers, wrote with flying feet The mountain pass on pathless snows; impatient Of rest, for aye, from Babylon to Memphis, From the Acropolis to Rome, they hurried.
And with them passed their guardian household gods, And faithful wisdom of their ancestors, And the seed sown in mother fields, and gathered, A fruitful harvest in their happier years. And, 'companying the order of their steps Upon the way, they sung the choruses And sacred burdens of their country's songs, And, sitting down by hospitable gates, They told the histories of their far-off cities. And sometimes in the lonely darknesses Upon the ambiguous way they found a light,-- The deathless lamp of some great truth, that Heaven Sent in compassionate answer to their prayers.