Edna Dean Proctor

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“We hail thee, we crown thee! To east and to westGod keep thee the purest, the noblest, the best;While all thy domain with a people He fillsAs free as thy winds and as firm as thy hills!”

“They may hang him on the gibbet; they may raise the victor's cryWhen they see him darkly swinging like a speck against the sky;—Ah! the dying of a hero that the right may win its way,Is but sowing seed for harvest in a warm and mellow May!Now his story shall be whispered by the firelight's evening glow,And in fields of rice and cotton when the hot noon passes slow,Till his name shall be a watchword from Missouri to the sea,And his planting find its reaping in the birthday of the Free!”

“Ah! what a day when all the way   To Marmora's sunny sea—From Finland's snows to fields of rose—   Shall Holy Russia be!”

“Have you heard how Holy Russia   Is guarded, night and day,By saints gone home to the world of light,   Yet watching her realm for aye?”

“And the chants, and the groans of the dying, as one,Went up to the Lord when the carnage was done.”

“Your King may be powerful—a brother I'll be—But vassal to none on the land or the sea!”

“And there he reclines with the air of a god,As if armies and kingdoms would fall at his nod;On his brow the imperial borla is bound,Its crimson fringe drooping his temples around,And above float the plumes of that bird of the skiesWhich only, they say, for his diadem flies.”

“O Troitsa's altar is divine,—  St. Sergius! hear our prayers!And Kiëff, Olga's lofty shrine,  The name of "The Holy" bears;But Moscow blends all rays in one,—They are the stars, and she the sun!”

“And Pole and Tartar and haughty GaulFlee, dismayed, from the Kremlin wall.”