| |
| YEARS, years of waiting, while in shapes terrific | |
| Have loomed the obstacles that held me back; | |
| And now I see, at length, the broad Pacific | |
| Rolling far westward in the sunset’s track; | |
| And now I know how that discoverer Spanish, | 5 |
| Balboa, his long toilsome journey made, | |
| One first glimpse caught, in fear the whole might vanish, | |
| A mirage,—dropped upon his knees and prayed. | |
| |
| The Sunset Sea! The noblest and the broadest | |
| Of all the oceans girdling wave-washed earth; | 10 |
| The calmest, gentlest, yet at times the maddest, | |
| In raving paroxysms of stormy mirth. | |
| The Eagle’s continent its eastern border; | |
| Its western, that on which one half mankind | |
| Sit under despotisms of deadly order | 15 |
| And bow to superstitions old as blind. | |
| |
| And yet how near together, spite of distance, | |
| Stand the two mighty continents, to-day! | |
| How nearly, at this stage of man’s existence, | |
| Current to current makes its powerful way! | 20 |
| Within this Golden Gate, the noblest, surely, | |
| Of all the entrances of all the seas, | |
| The Asian barks-of-hope float in securely, | |
| And furl their lateen sails, and ride at ease. | |
| |
| To prove that land to land is each a neighbor, | 25 |
| Though leagues unnumbered stretch between the twain; | |
| To complicate the problem vexed, of labor, | |
| And aid, one day, perhaps, to make it plain; | |
| While westward stretches, to the Orient boundless, | |
| An influence mighty, from the Land of Gold, | 30 |
| Of which no hope can e’er be vain or groundless | |
| Till all the New has leavened all the Old. | |
| |
| The Golden Gate, indeed! where cliffs stand sentry, | |
| And mountains heavenward lift their giant forms, | |
| And western gales make rough and dangerous entrée | 35 |
| To havens that shut away the wildest storms,— | |
| Fit index for the marvellous City, rising | |
| To granite strength from whelming waves and sands,— | |
| In wealth, in vice, in power, in good, surprising,— | |
| Most strange anomaly of human hands! | 40 |
| |
| The Golden Gate, indeed!—when morning flashes | |
| Its cloudless splendors o’er wave, cliff, and height, | |
| When wild the surf on rocky Lobos dashes, | |
| Then glorious, grand, exhilarant, and bright; | |
| But crowned supreme, when cloudland’s shapes immortal | 45 |
| Attend the sun low down the radiant west, | |
| And the grand gateway grows a gilded portal | |
| For sailing towards the Islands of the Blest. | |
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