Oh, you young radicals and dreamers,
You dauntless
Who pass by my headstone,
Mock not its record of my captaincy in the
And my faith in God!
They are not denials of each other.
Go by reverently, and read with sober
How a great people, riding with defiant
The centaur of Revolution,
Spurred and whipped to frenzy,
Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the
Over the precipice they were nearing,
And fell from his back in precipitate
To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.
Moved by the same sense of vast
Of life and death, and burdened as they
With the fate of a race,
How was I, a little blasphemer,
Caught in the drift of a nation's unloosened flood,
To remain a blasphemer,
And a captain in the army?
