Springfield 1636-1886, History of Town and City, by Mason A. Green ...

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That Faith and Hope nnd hiippy Memory
Would have away
Distrust and Gloom and boding Prophecy
Must bide some other bard and day!
A quarter of a thousand years ago
Our faith-led pioneers
Here made an end of pilgrimage,
Their object, as they thought, accomplished
80,
Contented in their simple spheres,
No further purpose did their thoughts
engage
Than to God's instant willing know
And do it instantly.
But what say we,
O Pilgrims of this later eager age?
Where shall we fix in all the coming years
The ending of our willing way?
When will your followers halt for hermitage,
O Wi/lkmi Pt/nc/ion, marshal of the day ?
Ah, not until our latest energies
Are lent unto the purposes
That led our fathers here across the seas;
The pilgrimage by them l)egun
Can be abandoned by no pilgrim's son.
We have their duties with their dower
inherited
And go not of ourselves but. Heaven-led,
Each one an instrument
Of God's will clearly manifest,
On to the doing of his next behest.
Search through the fabric of the Past,
And trace the thread —
Unparted and unfrayed from first to last
That makes the warp on which is spread
The wondrous woof of our heroic history,
And not one moment missed
Nor once involved in mystery —
The thread of God's intent —
That will forevermore insist
Till raan shall weave thereon the last event
Of Freedom's full accomplishment.
From hence straight on,
Upon the uncompleted pilgrimage
Still Freedom's wars perhaps to wage,
Our course and our successors' course is
laid,
And cannot be evaded or outstrayed
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SPRINGFIELD, 1630-18S6. 589
Until the latest pilgrim's foot shall rest
upon
That farthest strand
Which Time's last wasting wave
Shall lapsing lave.
Upon whose shining shore,
With pilgrims who have gone before,
Shall angels watching stand,
With brightened eyes, to see
The ending of the Leyden shallop's voyage
of liberty.
A quarter of a thousand years from now
Another band of pioneers
Shall pause to rest upon the lirow
Of some far loftier height,
We only see with Faith's prophetic sight,
And, gazing back adowu the years
Upon our age shall say,
" Ah, then and there the crucial time ap-
pears !
They were wise men who met the issues of
that day, —
Men just, who set their bondmen free,
Men brave, who shed their blood.
—
In lavish flood,
Not for their own, but all men's liberty, —
Men fair, who filled the flaws
Of justice — meting equitable laws;
That was the age
When regnant stood Reform upon the civil
stage
The era when the red men long aggrieved
Their wrested rights received
The century when the color line
No longer could the rights of man define;
" When Capital and Labor sensibly agreed
That each the other equally did need
When Mammon was from power dismissed
AVhen politics were purified
And office its official sought
And only merchandise was sold or bought;
And, side by side,
Accounted equals on the civil list.
The Woman and the Man
Commenced anew upon God's primal plan.
Ah ! those were pure and patriotic days " !
Unto such praise,
By \is to be deserved, from hence to-day
The Pilgrim, Pynchon's spirit marshals us
away !
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