mountains have, and all the earth,) Joys of the life befitting me and brothers mine, Our time, our term has come.
Nor yield we mournfully majestic brothers, We who have grandly fill’d our time; With Nature’s calm content, with tacit huge delight, We welcome what we wrought for through the past, And leave the field for them. For them predicted long, For a superber race, they too to grandly fill their time, For them we abdicate, in them ourselves ye forest kings! In them these skies and airs, these mountain peaks, Shasta, Nevadas, These huge precipitous cliffs, this amplitude, these valleys, far Yosemite, To be in them absorb’d, assimilated.
Then to a loftier strain, Still prouder, more ecstatic rose the chant, As if the heirs, the deities of the West, Joining with master-tongue bore part.
Not wan from Asia’s fetishes, Nor red from Europe’s old dynastic slaughter-house, (Area of murder-plots of thrones, with scent left yet of wars and scaffolds everywhere,) But come from Nature’s long and harmless throes, peacefully builded thence, These virgin lands, lands of the Western shore, To the new culminating man, to you, the empire new, You promis’d long, we pledge, we dedicate.
You occult deep volitions, You average spiritual manhood, purpose of all, pois’d on yourself, giving not taking law, You womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and love and aught that comes from life and love, You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials of America, (age upon age working in death the same as life,) You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space, You hidden national will lying in your abysms, conceal’d but ever alert, You past and present purposes tenaciously pursued, may-be unconscious of yourselves, Unswerv’d by all the passing errors, perturbations of the surface; You vital, universal, deathless germs, beneath all creeds, arts, statutes, literatures, Here build