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HOUSEHOLD DEITIES!
Then only shall be Happiness on earth
When Man shall feel your sacred power, and love
Your tranquil joys; then shall the city stand
A huge void sepulchre, and rising fair
Amid the ruins of the palace pile
The Olive grow, there shall the TREE OF PEACE
Strike its roots deep and flourish. This the state
Shall bless the race redeemed of Man, when WEALTH
And POWER and all their hideous progeny
Shall sink annihilate, and all mankind
Live in the equal brotherhood of LOVE.
Heart-calming hope and sure! for hitherward
Tend all the tumults of the troubled world,
Its woes, its wisdom, and its wickedness
Alike: so he hath will’d whose will is just.

Meantime, all hoping and expecting all
In patient faith, to you, DOMESTIC GODS!
I come, studious of other lore than song,
Of my past years the solace and support:
Yet shall my Heart remember the past years
With honest pride, trusting that not in vain
Lives the pure song of LIBERTY and TRUTH.

[Footnote 1: Hence one explanation of the name Penates, because they
were supposed to reign in the inmost Heavens.]

[Footnote 2:
This was the belief of the ancient Hetrusci, who called them Consentes
and Complicces]

[Footnote 3:

Oft, tho’ Wisdom wake, Suspicion sleeps
At Wisdom’s gate, and to Simplicity
Resigns her charge, while Goodness thinks no ill
Where no ill seems.
MILTON.]

[Footnote 4: One of the Ways and Means of the Tyrant Nabis. If one of his Subjects refused to lend him money, he commanded him to embrace his Apega; the statue of a beautiful Woman so formed as to clasp the victim to her breast, in which a pointed dagger was concealed.]

[Footnote 5:

Then did he set her by that snowy one,
Like the true saint beside the image set,
Of both their beauties to make paragone
And trial whether should the honour get:
Streightway so soone as both together met,
The enchaunted damzell vanish’d into nought;
Her snowy substance melted as with heat,
Ne of that goodly hew remayned ought
But the emptie girdle which about her wast was wrought.
SPENCER.]

[Footnote 6: Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. PROVERBS.

Qua non gravior mortalibus addita cura,
SPES ubi longa venit.
STATIUS.]

[Footnote 7: It is not certainly known under what form the Penates were worshipped. Some assert, as wooden or brazen rods shaped like trumpets: others, that they were represented as young men.]

[Footnote 8: The Saturnalia.]