Mould their own lives, and feel their pulses filled

With the red, fiery blood of the general life,

Making them mighty in peace, as now in

war

They are, even in the flush of victory, weak,

Conquering that manhood which should them subdue.

And what gift bring I to this untried world?

Shall the same tragedy be played anew,
And the same lurid curtain drop at last
On one dread desolation, one fierce crash
Of that recoil which on its makers God
Lets Ignorance and Sin and Hunger make,
Early or late? Or shall that common-
wealth

Whose potent unity and concentric force Can draw these scattered joints and parts of men

Into a whole ideal man once more,
Which sucks not from its limbs the life

away,

But sends it flood-tide and creates itself
Over again in every citizen,

Be there built up? For me, I have no choice;

I might turn back to other destinies,
For one sincere key opes all Fortune's doors;
But whoso answers not God's earliest call
Forfeits or dulls that faculty supreme
Of lying open to his genius

Which makes the wise heart certain of its ends.

Here am I; for what end God knows, not I; Westward still points the inexorable soul: Here am I, with no friend but the sad sea, The beating heart of this great enterprise, Which, without me, would stiffen in swift death;

This have I mused on, since mine eye could first

Among the stars distinguish and with joy Rest on that God-fed Pharos of the north, On some blue promontory of heaven lighted That juts far out into the upper sea;

To this one hope my heart hath clung for

years,

As would a foundling to the talisman Hung round his neck by hands he knew not

whose;

A poor, vile thing and dross to all beside,

Yet he therein can feel a virtue left
By the sad pressure of a mother's hand,
And unto him it still is tremulous
With palpitating haste and wet with tears,
The key to him of hope and humanness,
The coarse shell of life's pearl, Expectancy.
This hope hath been to me for love and
fame,

Hath made me wholly lonely on the earth,
Building me up as in a thick-ribbed tower,
Wherewith enwalled my watching spirit
burned,

Conquering its little island from the Dark, Sole as a scholar's lamp, and heard men's steps,

In the far hurry of the outward world, Pass dimly forth and back, sounds heard in dream.

As Ganymede by the eagle was snatched up

From the gross sod to be Jove's cup-bearer,
So was I lifted by my great design:
And who hath trod Olympus, from his eye
Fades not that broader outlook of the gods;
His life's low valleys overbrow earth's
clouds,

And that Olympian spectre of the past
Looms towering up in sovereign memory,
Beckoning his soul from meaner heights of

doom.

Had but the shadow of the Thunderer's bird,

Flashing athwart my spirit, made of me
A swift-betraying vision's Ganymede,
Yet to have greatly dreamed precludes low
ends;

Great days have ever such a morning-red,
On such a base great futures are built up,
And aspiration, though not put in act,
Comes back to ask its plighted troth again,
Still watches round its grave the unlaid
ghost

Of a dead virtue, and makes other hopes, Save that implacable one, seem thin and bleak

As shadows of bare trees upon the snow, Bound freezing there by the unpitying

moon.

While other youths perplexed their mandolins,

Praying that Thetis would her fingers twine

In the loose glories of her lover's hair,
And wile another kiss to keep back day,

I, stretched beneath the many-centuried shade

Of some writhed oak, the wood's Laocoön,
Did of my hope a dryad mistress make,
Whom I would woo to meet me privily,
Or underneath the stars, or when the

moon

Flecked all the forest floor with scattered pearls.

O days whose memory tames to fawning down

The surly fell of Ocean's bristled neck!

I know not when this hope enthralled me first,

But from my boyhood up I loved to hear
The tall pine-forests of the Apennine
Murmur their hoary legends of the sea,
Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld
The sudden dark of tropic night shut down
O'er the huge whisper of great watery
wastes,

The while a pair of herons trailingly Flapped inland, where some league-wide river hurled

The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred

By any but the North-wind's hurrying keels.

And not the pines alone; all sights and

sounds

To my world-seeking heart paid fealty,
And catered for it as the Cretan bees
Brought honey to the baby Jupiter,
Who in his soft hand crushed a violet,
Godlike foremusing the rough thunder's
gripe;

Then did I entertain the poet's song,
My great Idea's guest, and, passing o'er
That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell,
I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains
Whose adamantine links, his manacles,
The western main shook growling, and
still gnawed.

I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale
Of happy Atlantis, and heard Björne's
keel

Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore:

I listened, musing, to the prophecy
Of Nero's tutor-victim; lo, the birds
Sing darkling, conscious of the climbing

dawn.

And I believed the poets; it is they

Who utter wisdom from the central deep,
And, listening to the inner flow of things,
Speak to the age out of eternity.

Ah me! old hermits sought for solitude
In caves and desert places of the earth,
Where their own heart-beat was the only
stir

Of living thing that comforted the year;
But the bald pillar-top of Simeon,

In midnight's blankest waste, were populous,

Matched with the isolation drear and deep Of him who pines among the swarm of

men,

At once a new thought's king and pris

oner,

Feeling the truer life within his life,
The fountain of his spirit's prophecy,
Sinking away and wasting, drop by drop,
In the ungrateful sands of sceptic ears.
He in the palace-aisles of untrod woods
Doth walk a king; for him the pent-up
cell

Widens beyond the circles of the stars,
And all the sceptred spirits of the past
Come thronging in to greet him as their
peer;

But in the market-place's glare and throng
He sits apart, an exile, and his brow
Aches with the mocking memory of its

Of destiny's first-born, for smoother fields
That yield no crop of self-denying will;
A hand is stretched to him from out the
dark,

Which grasping without question, he is led
Where there is work that he must do for
God.

The trial still is the strength's complement,
And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales
The sheer heights of supremest purposes
Is steeper to the angel than the child.
Chances have laws as fixed as planets have,
And disappointment's dry and bitter root,
Envy's harsh berries, and the choking
pool

Of the world's scorn, are the right mothermilk

I have dug out the pith and sinewy heart
Of my aspiring life's fair trunk, be so
Cast up to warp and blacken in the sun,
Just as the opposing wind 'gins whistle off
His cheek-swollen pack, and from the lean-
ing mast

Fortune's full sail strains forward!

One poor day! Remember whose and not how short it is! It is God's day, it is Columbus's.

A lavish day! One day, with life and heart,

Is more than time enough to find a world.

AN INCIDENT OF THE FIRE AT HAMBURG

THE tower of old Saint Nicholas soared upward to the skies,

Like some huge piece of Nature's make, the growth of centuries;

You could not deem its crowding spires a work of human art,

They seemed to struggle lightward from a sturdy living heart.

Not Nature's self more freely speaks in crystal or in oak,

Than, through the pious builder's hand, in that gray pile she spoke;

And as from acorn springs the oak, so, freely and alone,

Sprang from his heart this hymn to God, sung in obedient stone.

It seemed a wondrous freak of chance, so perfect, yet so rough,

A whim of Nature crystallized slowly in granite tough;

The thick spires yearned towards the sky in quaint harmonious lines, And in broad sunlight basked and slept, like a grove of blasted pines.

Never did rock or stream or tree lay claim with better right

To all the adorning sympathies of shadow and of light;

And, in that forest petrified, as forester there dwells

Stout Herman, the old sacristan, sole lord of all its bells.

Till half of Hamburg lay engulfed beneath the eddying flood;

For miles away the fiery spray poured down its deadly rain,

And back and forth the billows sucked, and paused, and burst again.

From square to square with tiger leaps panted the lustful fire,

The air to leeward shuddered with the gasps of its desire;

And church and palace, which even now stood whelmed but to the knee, Lift their black roofs like breakers lone amid the whirling sea.

Up in his tower old Herman sat and watched with quiet look;

His soul had trusted God too long to be at last forsook;

He could not fear, for surely God a pathway would unfold

Through this red sea for faithful hearts, as once He did of old.

THE SOWER

I SAW a Sower walking slow
Across the earth, from east to west;
His hair was white as mountain snow,
His head drooped forward on his breast.
With shrivelled hands he flung his seed,
Nor ever turned to look behind;
Of sight or sound he took no heed;

It seemed he was both deaf and blind.

His dim face showed no soul beneath,
Yet in my heart I felt a stir,
As if I looked upon the sheath,

That once had held Excalibur.

I heard, as still the seed he cast, How, crooning to himself, he sung, "I sow again the holy Past,

The happy days when I was young.

"Then all was wheat without a tare,

Then all was righteous, fair, and true; And I am he whose thoughtful care Shall plant the Old World in the New.

"The fruitful germs I scatter free, With busy hand, while all men sleep; In Europe now, from sea to sea,

The nations bless me as they reap."

Then I looked back along his path,

And heard the clash of steel on steel, Where man faced man, in deadly wrath, While clanged the tocsin's hurrying peal.

The sky with burning towns flared red,
Nearer the noise of fighting rolled,
And brothers' blood, by brothers shed,
Crept curdling over pavements cold.

Then marked I how each germ of truth
Which through the dotard's fingers ran
Was mated with a dragon's tooth

Whence there sprang up an armëd man.

I shouted, but he could not hear;
Made signs, but these he could not see;
And still, without a doubt or fear,
Broadcast he scattered anarchy.

Long to my straining ears the blast

Brought faintly back the words he sung: