University of Virginia Library

MAN, THE SPIRIT

A small, swift planet, glimmering round a star,—
A molten drop with thinnest crusted shell
Of lime and flint, roofed-in with azure air,—
A winding stair of life, from Trilobite
And Saurian up to one who walks their king,
Drawing the lime and flint up through themselves
And kindling them to spirit, till on him,
Whose limbs are clay, there flames a lambent crown
Of fire from heaven,—these make our world.
What then
Is this wild creature, wandering up and down,
Seeking a thousand things, but keeping still
A thought of God in his heart? Why is he here,
Feet in the sod and thoughts among the stars,
Bewildered for some watchword or command,
As a battalion wavering on the field
Without a leader? In the march of worlds
Is Earth alone forgotten?
Who are we,
Clustered to-day with eyes and hands that clasp
As by some secret oath of brotherhood,
Out of the mass that jostles to and fro
Forever, without aim or hope? We are pledged
To UNDERSTAND, to live the truth we know,
And help men so to live and understand.
A handful 'gainst a host, we make our stand,
Nailing this thesis on the golden gate
Of the new Mammon-temples—that the souls—
The striving, praying, hoping, human souls—
Alone on earth are valuable—their end
To will God's will, because their will belongs
To him, the maker and the giver, so
Dilating to the broader destiny
Whose shadowy gateway opens from our world.
Out of the wrinkled bosom of the Old,
New England once was born; a rock-hewn race,
Puritan pilgrims, splendidly pure and grim.
Flint-set against all sham, they rose to say
'T was sunrise and the ghosts must vanish now
Before the living Fact: that a king's crowned head
Was but a man's head, and it must come off
Like any beggar's, when it wrought a wrong.
They freed society, the individual man
We must emancipate; they stripped all masks,
And knocked the fool's-caps off the venerable heads
Of church and state, and tore their pompous robes
To strings for children to fly kites with.
Here
Upon a coast whose calmer-blossoming surf
Beats not with such an iron clang as theirs,
We plant the Newer England; this our word,
That man is no mere spider-like machine
To spin out webs of railroads after him
In all earth's corners, nor a crafty brain
Made to knit cunning nets of politics
Or sharpen down to insignificance
On the grinding wheels of business, but a Soul,
That travelling higher worlds in upper light
Dips down through bodily contact into this;
As a hand trails over a boat's side through the waves,
And seems to the sea-creatures, eyed alone
For their own element, a thing of the sea.
Whether he wear the purple or the serge,
Whether he worship under frescoed pomp
Or bare-hewn rafters, it is still the man,
The individual spirit, something far
Beyond earth's chemistry, to whom all else
Are only foot-lights, scene, accessory,
Or nothing—or a farce, a mockery.
In this fair land, whose fields lie robed in bloom,
A living poem bound in blue and gold,
With azure flowers like little flecks of sky
Fallen, tangled in the dew-drops, to the grass,
And orange ones—as if the wealth below
Had blossomed up in beaten flakes of gold;
Where all the baser elements of earth,
Aspiring up through root, and stalk, and leaf,
Stand stretching delicate petal-wings toward heaven,
Poised on their slender feet for flying; here
Nature, like amorous Cleopatra, plots
To hold her Cæsar, brimming every sense
With perfume, song, and gorgeous coloring,
Throws softly wooing winds about his neck,
With sparkling air (as tho' not pearls alone,
But diamonds were dissolved in it), still fires
His brain to seek new dalliance, fresh delight,
Forgetful of his throne beyond the Sea.
Content with the golden Present, now, they say,
We must pore in the past no longer; our old books,
And antique, moss-grown system must give way
To the new patent methods for the mind;
New patent lives to lead, with no more dreams
And superstitions, only practical work.
A callow-winged philosophy breaks shell
And cackles prematurely loud that we
Are mummied, gone behind the times; no more
Dead languages, nor cloister-life—the lore
That will not take the harness for their use,
To weave, or grind, or burrow-out the mine,
Smells mouldy to their noses—Sophomores,
And parvenus of the intellectual world!
Who would brush down from heaven the olden stars,
To set new, self-adjusting spangles there,
Would mow the everlasting mountains off,
And build up straight, right-angled ones instead.
What is our training—what do colleges give
To men, which makes that feared and sneered-at thing,
A culture through the classics? Do we dare
Reveal the Eleusinian mysteries
Which leave such impress on these white boy-brows,
That the world, recognizing kingship, says,
“Here is a soul that knows itself, has touched
The centre, and radiates the broadening beams
Of influence straight to the point he means”?
We cannot, if we would, tell all; we hold
Some things there are that never can be told.
Articulate speech is but a coarse-woven sieve
That drops the fine gold through; some subtile chords
Of swift and ravishing music lurk between
The written notes. This only we can tell:
The boy, clear-eyed and beautiful-browed, is led
To a quiet spot arched over by great trees,
And this seal set upon him,—for four years
Sacred from all the tarnishing touch of men;
Shut from the jangling of the brazen bells
That strike the hours of the Present noisily,
He is bid to listen—and along the years
Float up the echoes of the Past, the world's
Birth-songs and marching-music, requiems and prayers.
He learns the languages that we call “dead”
(The only living ones, whose fire still glows
Beneath the ash of every modern tongue),
The scrolls that men have dabbled with heart's blood,
Blotted with tears, are his, to learn that all
Is accident and flying form except the soul.
The outer husk, the crown, the robes, or rags
Signify nothing; Roman, Greek, and Goth,
Ate, slept, and dreamed, and died, like modern men.
The audible word is nothing—if the lips
Prayed Zeus or Allah, Elohim or Lord,
The heart said still the same. He learns to choose
The changeless from the changing, as sole good.
Only the trivial chaff is fanned away,
As Time's broad wings go sweeping over earth.
The futile acquisitions of to-day
Tempt him but little, so the heart grow full
With inner force and outward-burning fire.
No surface buckling-on of glittering facts
His mind would have, but weapons that can make
The sinewy arm to wield them; for the sword
And shield will moulder, but the sinewy arm
Has many a field to fight beyond this earth.
Stretched under some cathedral-roof of elm,
Frescoed in flickering sunlights, with far eyes
That watch and do not see the summer sky—
A cloudy opal, veined as when a wave
Leaps up, and breaks, and leaves the milk-white foam
Streaking its meshes over the blue sea—
Flat to the ground, where he can seem to feel
The great earth heave beneath him like a ship
Plunging its course along the tideless space,
He whispers with his heart in thoughts like these:

THE FUTURE

And so we learn our world, finding how time
Is an illusion—the perspective all
But a mere trick of shadow, which can make
That misty peak seem far beyond the hill
In the foreground—touch it, and you see
'T is all one whole: The Greek stands at our side,
Toga and sandals shielding the same flesh
That coat and shoes do now, the same hot brain
Throbbing beneath the helmet as the hat.
As one who hums a tune about his work,
And hears a friend's voice from another room
Strike in an alto, so we hear afar
The sound of voices all along the past
Chording with ours. 'T was only yesterday
That Plato stood and talked with Socrates;
'T was last night Paul was here, and on the desk
He left his letters, which the air has turned
From parchment into paper for our use.
In the next room they wait; 't is but a step
Over the threshold to them there, yet since
The shadow of the tree of life lies dark
Across the doorway, like a faltering child
We dread the passage through the cold dark hall,
To where the Father calls, and they have gone.
What is the visible, tangible world all worth,
Except for symbols, somewhat coarse and large,
Like the raised letters for the blind to feel?
The shadowy domes serenely lifted up,
The soundless depths that deepen down in thought,
Make one small world draw dwindling to a point.
The little earth! Think, that the same bright sun,
Which rises there from the familiar hill
And laughs its level joy straight to our eyes,
Is wrapping half the globe in morning light,
Kindling dew-diamonds on the tropic palm,
Tipping the white gull's wing o'er Northern seas
And striking frozen fire from the iceberg's towers
At either pole.
The brisk and dapper minds
Are doubtless those which have had the practical
And not the philosophic training, yet
When the world wants a great man for great deeds,
Who ever took the modern-fashioned one,
Who had learned the useful only and eschewed
Dead languages or dreaming in the woods?
The great man ever has sought the sacred fire
From olden books, or from the older stars
In solitudes, away from the bustling streets
And babbling men.
Ah, who can speak of great
Nor think of him who was our greatest one?
Let us wait here, and lay a wreath of song
Upon our grave.

THE DEAD PRESIDENT

Earth's greatest ones ever have gone so far
Out on life's borderland, that they have caught
The sound of an infinite ocean, far away,
Rounding our island-world. But now appear
These new philosophers, practical, well-informed,
Assuring us there is no ocean-sound—
'T is but the roaring in our feverish ears.
They carry the glimmering lantern of conceit
Swinging along their path, and see no Night,
No fathomless, sombre glory of the dark,
But their own shadows, that seem giant forms,
Stalking across the fields and fences—they
That are stumbling pygmies!
They will show you God
And all his universe in a nutshell: see!
Pinched in our little theory like a vice,
We cleave the nut with a keen hypothesis,
Whisk off the top—there 't is convenient
For logical handling. “Cannot see?” Oh, then
You have spoiled your eyes with gazing at the sun.
Hard, angular, and dry, they pish and pooh
At all ideas they cannot measure off
And pack into their iron-bound, narrow brain.
They'll not admit the existence of a truth
Which cannot be expressed in x and y,
And solved by their quadratics. Well, they serve
To show a new phenomenon in the world:
That a mind, if taken in time, can be transformed
To a machine of clockwork, cogs and wheels
Wound up with useful facts, and set away
On a shelf to go its narrow round of thought
And tell us when 't is noon or supper time,
If we get careless through abstraction. So
All men, even these, have uses. Some to go
Whirling around the circumference
Spinning out sparks into the darkling space,
While some sit staidly at the safe, slow hub
And swear there are no radii and no rim,
No winged steeds far at the chariot's pole,
No Power that rides, triumphant, terrible.
What has this new, pert century done for man,
That it affords to sneer at all before,
Because it rides its aimless jaunts by steam
And blabs its trivial talk by telegraph?
What of it? Are not babes born naked now,
As ever, and go naked from the world?
If I am the ape's cousin, what to me
Are steam and harnessed lightning, art and law?
If the night comes on so soon, what matters it
If the short day be foul or fair—if Fate
Rain thunderbolts or roses on our heads?
Yea, even 't were some satisfaction then
To stand and take the thunderbolts, and think
We are large enough at least to serve as marks
For gods to hurl at.
If there is no key,
Why puzzle longer with the scribbled scroll
We blur our eyes on? But, O merciful God,
If our souls are immortal, O forgive
That we still creep on dusty hands and knees,
Face downward to the ground, when we might walk
Erect, and face the heavens, and see thy stars!
We gaze from our separate windows on the Night
And find our own small faces imaged there
In the glass, nor ever see the shadowy plain
Stretching out through the dimness, on and on.
Splendid beginners, still we toil and fill
The vestibule of our lives with useless plans,
With noise of hammer, scaffolding and dust
And rubbish, building some imagined fane
To worship in through years that never come.
For life is like the legendary bird
The Christ-child's hands were moulding out of clay:
While we are shaping it with eager care,
We look up startled, for the bird has flown!
Ah, if the mind could sometimes be content
To cease from its male madness, its desire
To radiate outward, and in passive rest
Receive from Nature's ever-waiting arms
Energy, fire, and life! We blind ourselves
With briny sweat-drops, even more than tears.
Ever with burning haste we scorch our souls,
And set their compass-needles whirring round
So they can never keenly point to the pole.
There 's such a clash and jar kept up within,
Hissing of nerve-steam, iron purposes
Clanging on one another, who can hear
The sweet, sweet silver voices from afar?
Ah, let a man but listen! Have we not
Two ears for silence, one small mouth for noise?
Listen until we catch the key, and know
Our note, and then chime in—not rave and run,
And shout our frantic orders, just as though
We were the leader of the orchestra,
Not little separate voices; could we wait,
Each in his corner, conning quietly
His part, the chords would be the sweeter for it.

A PARADOX

HOME

So let us live, not pent in noisy towns,
But in calm places, watching all things fair—
The months following in waves across the fields,
Each stranding there new flowery pearls and shells;
The flocks of shadows nestled 'neath the trees;
The laughing brooks, like mischievous children still
Tangling the silver thread of the motherly moon.
So shall Earth be no more a theatre,
In which a tragic comedy is played—
A horrible farce with too real murder in it—
But a fair field where till the break of day
Man wrestles with the Angel of his fate
For an immortal blessing.
If we knew,
O Father, if we knew we die not, but
Live on, we should live worthier of thy love:
So help thy little ones to know and live:
That as a shadow which goes reaching forth
Longer and longer as the sun goes down,
The soul may stretch forth toward the great Unseen,
Until the sacred, solemn starlight comes
Gathering our individual shadows in its own.