Whose merchantmen were princes, and the honourable of the earth:

Whose traders came from the islands--from far off summer places,
Bringing spices and pearls, and the furs and skins of beasts.
Men from the frozen North, and men with fierce dark faces,
Full of the desert fire, and the untamed life of the East.

Treasures of gems and gold, of statues and flowers and fountains,
Vases of onyx and jasper from Indian emperors sent;
Pictures out of the heart of tropical sunlit mountains,
Of rocks of porphyry piled at the gates of the Occident.

Dusk-brown sons of the forest, hunters of deer and of bison,
And the almond-eyed child of the sun met in her busy streets,
With waifs from the banks of the Indus, and the ancient river Pison--
Lands of the date and the palm, and the citron's hoarded sweets.

The surging tide of the prairie rolled its billows of blossom
Against her mighty walls, and beat at her hundred gates;
The riches of all the world were poured into her bosom,
Kings were her mighty men, and lords, and potentates.

She sat in her place by the sea, and the swift-sailing ships
obeyed her.
Full freighted with corn and wheat their purple sails unfurled,
Far-off in the morning land, and the isles beyond the equator;
Out of her heaped-up garners she scattered the bread of the world.

As her pride and her beauty were perfect, so desolation and mourning,
Swift and sudden, and sure her utter destruction came,