"The Bard's Breath" is a Winds of Change.NET feature bringing you art, quotes and verse related to our times every Tuesday and Thursday. We all need a bit more than just news to make it through these times: Spirit. Perspective. Faith. Humour. Reminders of humanity, and horror, and the shape of true victory.

In the 1800s, a poet named James Russell Lowell penned "The Present Crisis". It was mostly about slavery, but Porphyrogenitus notes that it has current relevance too:

"When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast.
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of the century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time."....

There's a lot more, and since I found it via Porphyrogenitus it's only fair to send you there for the link to the rest.