University of Virginia Library

I have loved him all my life, since life had a meaning at all,
I loved him, I think, in my heart, before ever the sound of his name
Ran through our student-ranks with the light and the speed of a flame.
He was my hero; I loved him for all that he had gone through,
For all he had dared to be, for all he had dared to do;
For all he had said and suffered, for all he had felt and known,
And the fire in his soul was the same that lit the dim lamp of my own.
O my hero! my man who is all that I fain would be,
The perfect picture whose outline is traced so rudely in me!
He has trodden the path I trod when I deemed myself lone in the way;
He has striven, as I, through the night; he has dreamed, as I, of the day;
One faith in one fate has led the feet of us, lonely, apart;
One infinite exquisite hope filled the void in his heart—in my heart;
And by desolate wearyful ways we have journeyed at last to this place,
And he has not heard my name, and I have not seen his face.
Love needs no sight of his face: I know what his face will be—
The glass that the soul looks through—the soul that is one with me.
A Christ, who has borne our sorrows, upheld by a force divine?
Give me the man of my nature, whose soul has been torn like mine,
Who, strong in his human weakness, out of the depths has passed;
He is myself as I would be! And now I shall see him at last!
Life has been hard. So it seems, when one tries to tell how it sped,
A life made empty with losses, and cold as the lips of the dead!
But to live, it has not been hard, being filled with undying desire;
And what is one's life but fuel, to feed the immortal fire?
And what is one life to give—though one gives it the hardest way—
For the sake of the splendid faith that lightens our night of to-day?
O for a thousand lives, to live out to the last sad breath!
O for a million chances to agonise even to death!
The hardest thing in life is to know that life is so small,
So worthless a thing to give, though one's whole soul gives it all!

I was born in a twilight world, where the wrong looks one with the right
But I passed through the shadow of death, and my soul came into the light.
How did it first begin—this hope that gives life its worth?
How does the Spring begin in the breast of the longing earth?
The seeds are at work, at work, unseen of their master, the sun,
Till they pierce through the heavy mould, and behold! the Spring is begun.
So blindly at work in my soul the seeds of the new hope were,
Till the sun of Freedom drew them to bud and blossom and bear.
‘I have but one life,’ I said, ‘and I know where that life is due;
O people, oppressed and trampled, I owe it, I pay it, to you!’

For the core of the thing is this, though few perceive it as yet—
We owe the labouring people a great unbearable debt.
The debt of all that we are, and all we are not, we owe
To the people who toiled unknowing, that we untoiling may know:
Our knowledge, our strength, our soul, our very body and blood,
We owe to these who have made us, shaped us for ill or good,
And to them shall the debt be paid; and all that they gave I will spend
For them. They have nourished me. They shall find they have nourished a friend!
A friend? I will be the people, one heart and one soul with these,
Who have lived hard lives and bitter, to give me a life of ease.
Their cause and my cause are one, and my cause and their cause are his,
Who gave up his youth to teaching the people the thing that is.
And he will come here. I shall show him my heart, he will show me his heart.
The world shall see two men together are more than two men are apart.
For this is the Holy Spirit, the union of men for the right,
The maker and giver of life, the soul and spirit of light.