In guileless youth's diviner way;
Life sings not now, but prophesies;
Tim's shadows they no more behold,
But, under them, the riddle old
Taat mocks, bewilders, and defies:
In childhood's face the seed of shame,
In the green tree an ambushed flame,
In Phosphor a vaunt-guard of Night,
They, though against their will, di-
vine,
And dread the care-dispelling wine
Stored from the Muse's vintage bright,
By age imbued with second-sight.
From Faith's own eyelids there peeps
out,
Even as they look, the leer of doubt;
The festal wreath their fancy loads
With care that whispers and forebodes :
Nor this our triumph-day can blunt
Megæra's goads.
Bugbear of fools, a summons to the | Secure against his own mistakes,
Strength found he in the unsympathizing sun,
And strange stars from beneath the
horizon won,
And the dumb ocean pitilessly grave:
High-hearted surely he;
But bolder they who first off-cast
Their moorings from the habitable Past
And ventured chartless on the sea
Of storm-engendering Liberty :
For all earth's width of waters is a
span,
And their convulsed existence mere repose,
Matched with the unstable heart of man,
Shoreless in wants, mist-girt in all it
knows,
Open to every wind of sect or clan,
And sudden-passionate in ebbs and flows.
They steered by stars the elder shipmen knew,
And laid their courses where the currents draw
Of ancient wisdom channelled deep in law,
Who changed the Old World for the
New,
And more devoutly prized
Than all perfection theorized
The more imperfect that had roots and grew.
They founded deep and well,
Those danger-chosen chiefs of men
Who still believed in Heaven and Hell,
Nor hoped to find a spell,
In some fine flourish of a pen,
To make a better man
Content with what life gives or takes,
And acting still on some fore-ordered
plan,
A cog of iron in an iron wheel,
Too nicely poised to think or feel,
Dumb motor in a clock-like commonweal.
They wasted not their brain in schemes
Of what man might be in some bubble-
sphere,
As if he must be other than he seems
Because he was not what he should be
here,
Postponing Time's slow proof to petu-
lant dreams :
Yet herein they were great
Beyond the incredulous lawgivers of yore,
And wiser than the wisdom of the shelf,
That they conceived a deeper-rooted
state,
Of hardier growth, alive from rind to
core,
By making man sole sponsor of himself.
God of our fathers, Thou who wast,
Art, and shalt be when those eye-wise
who flout
Thy secret presence shall be lost
In the great light that dazzles them to
doubt,
We, sprung from loins of stalwart men
Whose strength was in their trust
That Thou wouldst make thy dwelling
in their dust
And walk with them a fellow-citizen
Who build a city of the just,
We, who believe Life's bases rest
Beyond the probe of chemic test,
Still, like our fathers, feel Thee near,
Sure that, while lasts the immutable
decree,
Than long-considering Nature will or The land to Human Nature dear
Shall not be unbeloved of Thee.