The Fading Vision
By Helen Leah Reed
The vision fades - dome, pinnacle and tower,
All the white beauty of the lake-side dream,
The artist's ideal, the poet's theme
Vanish away. Yet for no fleeting hour
Was this proud fabric raised. The crumbling wall
Entombs not memory's treasure, and we hold
This truth dear as the miser his loved gold,
Dome, pinnacle and tower cannot fall.
No marvel this, that memory holds fast
Such beauty, passing beauty seen before,
The grace and charm of every clime and shore,
Strength of today, the glories of the past,
All met in one great whole - for not alone
Man's hand the wonder wrought, but soaring high
His spirit, like the bird that cleaves the sky,
Knew naught of obstacle from zone to zone.
Deathless his work. Age shall repeat to age
The story of the city by the Lake.
And as the waves that on the near sands break
Reach far-off shores, so on the pictured page
Throughout remotest time, serene in pride,
Wearing her crown of glory, shall be seen
Stately and fair, Chicago, Western queen,
With all the Nations gathered at her side.
Gladly they met, each teaching and each taught,
Light-skinned or dark-skinned from the West or East.
Peoples unlike, as at a loving feast,
Distant no more, united in a thought.
Columbia! this thy lesson, learn it well -
The comity of Nations; this the plan
Of God from time's first dawn, that man with man,
Bound in one brotherhood in peace should dwell.
Great Voyager, whose caravels outsped
Man's swiftest fancy in those earlier days!
If, looking far beyond the curving bays
Of this new world thy glowing spirit read
That here there stretched a mighty continent
Where a sure haven for mankind should be,
Small didst thou count thy peril on the sea,
Well knowing what thy sufferings had meant.
For it was thine to turn toward the West
The worn old-world, and westward as the star
Of Power moves, nor tyranny nor war
Its fires sustains - it shines for the oppressed.
The vision fades - dome, pinnacle and tower -
Yet fades not like the substance of a dream -
Nation to Nation, State to State shall seem
Drawn to each other closer through its power.
1893