And demonstrate their fitness to command.

The Norsemen, on the North Atlantic wave;
Columbus, passing out in unknown seas;
De Soto, gaining but an unknown grave;
The hardy Pilgrims, on their bended knees;
The Argonauts, upon the Western slope--
These are the souls no human praise can reach.
Each, in their turn, gave empire back to hope,
And all are greater than the gift of speech.
No pen can lustre their unfading claim;
No cenotaph do honor to their dust--
These are crown jewels on the brow of Fame;
Their conquest is supreme, their laurels ever just.

Yet, in the van of empire, still is left
The noiseless print of ancestry more grand;
Indentures chiseled in the highest cleft,
By giants of a long forgotten land,--
The nameless graves of centuries untold;
The ashes of the prehistoric age;
The self-forgetting litany of gold--
How vast their monuments, how broad their page!
In what a grand democracy of death
They lift their silent fingers to our years,
Melt our memorials with a single breath
In mute companionship of life and tears!

We are but pygmies to the almighty past,
The names we honor but the surface-mould;
Beneath must lie an empire far more vast,
Whose fundaments alone deserve the name of "old."

Not many years, till they had found the bed
Of copper ore upon Superior's rim;
And hither many of the hardy ones were led
By Orchas, quick in architrave, and fleet of limb;
And many the fantastic implements he shaped
For husbandry; no want of theirs escaped
His eager scrutiny--the axe and blade,
The rough-made pick, and the encumbered spade,
The vessels for the housewife, and the spear,
And other weaponry for bison and for deer.
All these were fashioned in an uncouth way,
And yet they filled the purpose of the day.

They had not reached the iron age of thought,
And what they made, necessity had taught;
But riper years must ope the "Sampson Mine,"
And wake the rugged giant, in the shine
Of a meridian sunlight; they little tho