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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=418968" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>A Nation's Test</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I. <br>A NATION'S greatness lies in men, not acres; <br>One master-mind is worth a million hands. <br>No royal robes have marked the planet-shakers, <br>But Samson-strength to burst the ages' bands. <br>The might of empire gives no crown supernal— <br>Athens is here—but where is Macedon? <br>A dozen lives make Greece and Rome eternal, <br>And England's fame might safely rest on one.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Here test and text are drawn from Nature's preaching:<br>Afric and Asia—half the rounded earth— <br>In teeming lives the solemn truth are teaching, <br>That insect-millions may have human birth. <br>Sun-kissed and fruitful, every clod is breeding <br>A petty life, too small to reach the eye: <br>So must it be, with no man thinking, leading, <br>The generations creep their course and die.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Hapless the lands, and doomed amid the races,<br>That give no answer to this royal test; <br>Their toiling tribes will droop ignoble faces, <br>Till earth in pity takes them back to rest. <br>A vast monotony may not be evil, <br>But God's light tells us it cannot be good; <br>Valley and hill have beauty—but the level <br>Must bear a shadeless and a stagnant brood.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>II.<br>I bring the touchstone. Motherland, to thee, <br>And test thee trembling, fearing thou shouldst fail; <br>If fruitless, sonless, thou wert proved to be, <br>Ah, what would love and memory avail?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Brave land! God has blest thee!<br>Thy strong heart I feel, <br>As I touch thee and test thee— <br>Dear land! As the steel<br>To the magnet flies upward, so rises thy breast, <br>With a motherly pride to the touch of the test. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>III.<br>See! she smiles beneath the touchstone, looking on her distant youth, <br>Looking down her line of leaders and of workers for the truth.<br>Ere the Teuton, Norseman, Briton, left the primal woodland spring, <br>When their rule was might and rapine, and their law a painted king; <br>When the sun of art and learning still was in the Orient; <br>When the pride of Babylonia under Cyrus' hand was shent; <br>When the sphinx's introverted eye turned fresh from Egypt's guilt; <br>When the Persian bowed to Athens; when the Parthenon was built; <br>When the Macedonian climax closed the Commonwealths of Greece; <br>When the wrath of Roman manhood burst on Tarquin for Lucrece—<br>Then was Erin rich in knowledge—thence from out her Ollamh's store— <br>Kenned to-day by students only—grew her ancient Senchus More; <br>Then were reared her mighty builders, who made temples to the sun— <br>There they stand—the old Round Towers—showing how their work was done: <br>Thrice a thousand years upon them—shaming all our later art— <br>Warning fingers raised to tell us we must build with rev’'rent heart.<br>Ah, we call thee Mother Erin! Mother thou in right of years; <br>Mother in the large fruition—mother in the joys and tears. <br>All thy life has been a symbol — we can only read a part: <br>God will flood thee ,yet with sunshine for the woes that drench thy heart.<br>All thy life has been symbolic of a human mother's life: <br>Youth's sweet hopes and dreams have vanished, and the travail and the strife<br>Are upon thee in the present; but thy work until to-day <br>Still has been for truth and manhood—and it shall not pass away: <br>Justice lives, though judgment lingers—angels' feet are heavy shod—<br>But a planet's years are moments in th' eternal day of God!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>IV.<br>Out from the valley of death and tears, <br>From the war and want of a thousand years, <br>From the mark of sword and the rust of chain, <br>From the smoke and blood of the penal laws, <br>The Irishmen and the Irish cause <br>Come out in the front of the field again! </div><div style="margin:10px 0">What says the stranger to such a vitality?<br>What says the statesman to this nationality?<br>Flung on the shore of a sea of defeat,<br>Hardly the swimmers have sprung to their feet,<br>When the nations are thrilled by a clarion-word,<br>And Burke, the philosopher-statesman, is heard.<br>When shall his equal be? Down from the stellar height<br>Sees he the planet and all on its girth— <br>India, Columbia, and Europe—his eagle-sight<br>Sweeps at a glance all the wrong upon earth. <br>Races or sects were to him a profanity:<br>Hindoo and Negro and Kelt were as one; <br>Large as mankind was his splendid humanity,<br>Large in its record the work he has done.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>V.<br>What need to mention men of minor note,<br>When there be minds that all the heights attain? <br>What school-boy knoweth not the hand that wrote<br>'Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain' <br>What man that speaketh English e'er can lift<br>His voice 'mid scholars, who hath missed the lore<br>Of Berkeley, Curran, Sheridan, and Swift,<br>The art of Foley and the songs of Moore? <br>Grattan and Flood and Emmet—where is he<br>That hath not learned respect for such as <br>Who loveth humor, and hath yet to see<br>Lover and Prout and Lever and Maclise?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">VI.<br>Great men grow greater by the lapse of time:<br>We know those least whom we have seen the latest;<br>And they, 'mongst those whose names have grown sublime, <br>Who worked for Human Liberty, are greatest. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And now for one who allied will to work, <br>And thought to act, and burning speech to thought; <br>Who gained the prizes that were seen by Burke— <br>Burke felt the wrong—O'Council felt, and fought.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ever the same—from boyhood up to death: <br>His race was crushed—his people were defamed; <br>He found the spark, and fanned it with his breath, <br>And fed the fire, till all the nation flamed!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He roused the farms—he made the serf a yeoman;<br>He drilled his millions and he faced the foe; <br>But not with lead or steel he struck the foeman:<br>Reason the sword—and human right the blow.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He fought for home—but no land-limit bounded <br>O'Connell's faith, nor curbed his sympathies; <br>All wrong to liberty must be confounded, <br>Till men were chainless as the winds and seas. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">He fought for faith—but with no narrow spirit;<br>With ceaseless hand the bigot laws he smote; <br>One chart, he said, all mankind should inherit,—<br>The right to worship and the right to vote. <br>Always the same—but yet a glinting prism:<br>In wit, law, statecraft, still a master-hand; <br>An 'uncrowned king,' whose people's love was chrism;<br>His title—Liberator of his Land!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">'His heart's in Rome, his spirit is in heaven'— <br>So runs the old song that his people sing;<br>A tall Round Tower they builded in Glasnevin— <br>Fit Irish headstone for an Irish king!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>VII.<br>Oh Motherland! there is no cause to doubt thee:<br>Thy mark is left on every shore to-day. <br>Though grief and wrong may cling like robes about thee,<br>Thy motherhood will keep thee queen alway. <br>In faith and patience working, and believing <br>Not power alone can make a noble state: <br>Whate'er the land, though all things else conceiving, <br>Unless it breed great men, it is not great. <br>Go on, dear land, and midst the generations <br>Send out strong men to cry the word aloud; <br>Thy niche is empty still amidst the nations—<br>Go on in faith, and God must raise the cloud.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=John+Boyle+O%27Reilly">John Boyle O'Reilly</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=418968" data-title="A Nation's Test de John Boyle O'Reilly" data-description="I. 
A NATION'S greatness lies in men, not acres; 
One master-mind is worth a million hands. 
No royal robes have marked the planet-shakers, 
But Samson-strength to burst the ages' bands. 
The might of empire gives no crown supernal— 
Athens is h..."></div>
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