He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist would settle; and erelong The darkness fell, and I was left alone.
V.
ALONE ALONE! no climber of an Alpine cliff, No Arctic venturer on the waveless sea, Feels the dread stillness round him as it chills The heart of him who leaves the slumbering earth To watch the silent worlds that crowd the sky.
Alone! And as the shepherd leaves his flock To feed upon the hillside, he meanwhile Finds converse in the warblings of the pipe Himself has fashioned for his vacant hour, So have I grown companion to myself, And to the wandering spirits of the air That smile and whisper round us in our dreams.
Thus have I learned to search if I may know The whence and why of all beneath the stars And all beyond them, and to weigh my life As in a balance,--poising good and ill Against each other,--asking of the Power That flung me forth among the whirling worlds, If I am heir to any inborn right, Or only as an atom of the dust That every wind may blow where'er it will.
VI.
QUESTIONING I AM not humble; I was shown my place, Clad in such robes as Nature had at hand; Took what she gave, not chose; I know no shame, No fear for being simply what I am.
I am not proud, I hold my every breath At Nature's mercy.

I am as a babe Borne in a giant's arms, he knows not where; Each several heart-beat, counted like the coin A miser reckons, is a special gift As from an unseen hand; if that withhold Its bounty for a moment, I am left A clod upon the earth to which I fall.
Something I find in me that well might claim The love of beings in a sphere above This doubtful twilight world of right and wrong; Something that shows me of the self-same clay That creeps or swims or flies in humblest form.
Had I been asked, before I left my bed Of shapeless dust, what clothing I would wear, I would have said, More angel and less worm; But for their sake who are even such as I, Of the same mingled blood, I would not choose To hate that meaner portion of myself Which makes me brother to the least of men.
I dare not be a coward with my lips Who dare to question all things in my soul; Some men may find their wisdom on their knees, Some prone and grovelling in the dust like slaves; Let the meek glowworm glisten in the dew; I ask to lift my taper to the sky As they who hold their lamps above their heads, Trusting the larger currents up aloft, Rather than crossing eddies round their breast, Threatening with every puff the flickering blaze.
My life shall be a challenge, not a truce! This is my homage to the mightier powers, To ask my boldest question, undismayed By muttered threats that some hysteric sense Of wrong or insult will convulse the throne Where wisdom reigns supreme; and if I err, They all must err who have to feel their way As bats that fly at noon; for what are we But creatures of the night, dragged forth by day, Who needs must stumble, and with stammering steps Spell out their paths in syllables of pain?
Thou wilt not hold in scorn the child who dares Look up to Thee, the Father,--dares to ask More than thy wisdom answers.

From thy hand The worlds were cast; yet every leaflet claims From that same hand its little shining sphere Of star-lit dew; thine image, the great sun, Girt with his mantle of tempestuous flame, Glares in mid-heaven; but to his noon-tide blaze The slender violet lifts its lidless eye, And from his splendor steals its fairest hue, Its sweetest perfume from his scorching fire.
VII.
WORSHIP FROM my lone turret as I look around O'er the green meadows to the ring of blue, From slope, from summit, and from half-hid vale The sky is stabbed with dagger-pointed spires, Their gilded symbols whirling in the wind, Their brazen tongues proclaiming to the world, "Here truth is sold, the only genuine ware; See that it has our trade-mark! You will buy Poison instead of food across the way, The lies of -- ---" this or that, each several name The standard's blazon and the battle-cry Of some true-gospel faction, and again The token of the Beast to all beside.
And grouped round each I see a huddling crowd Alike in all things save the words they use; In love, in longing, hate and fear the same.
Whom do we trust and serve?
We speak of one And bow to many; Athens still would find The shrines of all she worshipped safe within Our tall barbarian temples, and the thrones That crowned Olympus mighty as of old.
The god of music rules the Sabbath choir; The lyric muse must leave the sacred nine To help us please the dilettante's ear; Plutus limps homeward with us, as we leave The portals of the temple where we knelt And listened while the god of eloquence (Hermes of ancient days, but now disguised In sable vestments) with that other god Somnus, the son of Erebus and Nox, Fights in unequal contest for our souls; The dreadful sovereign of the under world Still shakes his sceptre at us, and we hear The baying of the triple-throated hound; Eros is young as ever, and as fair The lovely Goddess born of ocean's foam.
These be thy gods, O Israel! Who is he, The one ye name and tell us that ye serve, Whom ye would call me from my lonely tower To worship with the many-headed throng?
Is it the God that walked in Eden's grove In the cool hour to seek our guilty sire?
The God who dealt with Abraham as the sons Of that old patriarch deal with other men?
The jealous God of Moses, one who feels An image as an insult, and is wroth With him who made it and his child unborn?
The God who plagued his people for the sin Of their adulterous king, beloved of him,-- The same who offers to a chosen few The right to praise him in eternal song While a vast shrieking world of endless woe Blends its dread chorus with their rapturous hymn?
Is this the God ye mean, or is it he Who heeds the sparrow's fall, whose loving heart Is as the pitying father's to his child, Whose lesson to his children is "Forgive," Whose plea for all, "They know not what they do"?
VIII.
MANHOOD I CLAIM the right of knowing whom I serve, Else is my service idle; He that asks My homage asks it from a reasoning soul.
To crawl is not to worship; we have learned A drill of eyelids, bended neck and knee, Hanging our prayers on hinges, till we ape The flexures of the many-jointed worm.
Asia has taught her Allahs and salaams To the world's children,-we have grown to men! We who have rolled the sphere beneath our feet To find a virgin forest, as we lay The beams of our rude temple, first of all Must frame its doorway high enough for man To pass unstooping; knowing as we do That He who shaped us last of living forms Has long enough been served by creeping things, Reptiles that left their footprints in the sand Of old sea-margins that have turned to stone, And men who learned their ritual; we demand To know Him first, then trust Him and then love When we have found Him worthy of our love, Tried by our own poor hearts and not before; He must be truer than the truest friend, He must be tenderer than a woman's love, A father better than the best of sires; Kinder than she who bore us, though we sin Oftener than did the brother we are told We--poor ill-tempered mortals--must forgive, Though seven times sinning threescore times and ten.
This is the new world's gospel: Be ye men! Try well the legends of the children's time; Ye are the chosen people, God has led Your steps across the desert of the deep As now across the desert of the shore; Mountains are cleft before you as the sea Before the wandering tribe of Israel's sons; Still onward rolls the thunderous caravan, Its coming printed on the western sky, A cloud by day, by night a pillared flame; Your prophets are a hundred unto one Of them of old who cried, "Thus saith the Lord;" They told of cities that should fall in heaps, But yours of mightier cities that shall rise Where yet the lonely fishers spread their nets, Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl; The tree of knowledge in your garden grows Not single, but at every humble door; Its branches lend you their immortal food, That fills you with the sense of what ye are, No servants of an altar hewed and carved From senseless stone by craft of human hands, Rabbi, or dervish, brahmin, bishop, bonze, But masters of the charm with which they work To keep your hands from that forbidden tree! Ye that have tasted that divinest fruit, Look on this world of yours with opened eyes! Y e are as gods! Nay, makers of your gods,-- Each day ye break an image in your shrine And plant a fairer image where it stood Where is the Moloch of your fathers' creed, Whose fires of torment burned for span--long babes?
Fit object for a tender mother's love! Why not?
It was a bargain duly made For these same infants through the surety's act Intrusted with their all for earth and heaven, By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well His fitness for the task,--this, even this, Was the true doctrine only yesterday As thoughts are reckoned,--and to--day you hear In words that sound as if from human tongues Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth As would the saurians of the age of slime, Awaking from their stony sepulchres And wallowing hateful in the eye of day! IX.
RIGHTS WHAT am I but the creature Thou hast made?
What have I save the blessings Thou hast lent?
What hope I but thy mercy and thy love?
Who but myself shall cloud my soul with fear?
Whose hand protect me from myself but thine?
I claim the rights of weakness, I, the babe, Call on my sire to shield me from the ills That still beset my path, not trying me With snares beyond my wisdom or my strength, He knowing I shall use them to my harm, And find a tenfold misery in the sense That in my childlike folly I have sprung The trap upon myself as vermin use, Drawn by the cunning bait to certain doom.
Who wrought the wondrous charm that leads us on To sweet perdition, but the selfsame power That set the fearful engine to destroy His wretched offspring (as the Rabbis tell), And hid its yawning jaws and treacherous springs In such a show of innocent sweet flowers It lured the sinless angels and they fell?
Ah! He who prayed the prayer of all mankind Summed in those few brief words the mightiest plea For erring souls before the courts of heaven,-- _Save us from being tempted_,--lest we fall! If we are only as the potter's clay Made to be fashioned as the artist wills, And broken into shards if we offend The eye of Him who made us, it is well; Such love as the insensate lump of clay That spins upon the swift-revolving wheel Bears to the hand that shapes its growing form,-- Such love, no more, will be our hearts' return To the great Master-workman for his care,-- Or would be, save that this, our breathing clay, Is intertwined with fine innumerous threads That make it conscious in its framer's hand; And this He must remember who has filled These vessels with the deadly draught of life,-- Life, that means death to all it claims.

Our love Must kindle in the ray that streams from heaven, A faint reflection of the light divine; The sun must warm the earth before the rose Can show her inmost heart-leaves to the sun.
He yields some fraction of the Maker's right Who gives the quivering nerve its sense of pain; Is there not something in the pleading eye Of the poor brute that suffers, which arraigns The law that bids it suffer?
Has it not A claim for some remembrance in the book That fills its pages with the idle words Spoken of men?
Or is it only clay, Bleeding and aching in the potter's hand, Yet all his own to treat it as He will And when He will to cast it at his feet, Shattered, dishonored, lost forevermore?
My dog loves me, but could he look beyond His earthly master, would his love extend To Him who--Hush! I will not doubt that He Is better than our fears, and will not wrong The least, the meanest of created things! He would not trust me with the smallest orb That circles through the sky; He would not give A meteor to my guidance; would not leave The coloring of a cloudlet to my hand; He locks my beating heart beneath its bars And keeps the key himself; He measures out The draughts of vital breath that warm my blood, Winds up the springs of instinct which uncoil, Each in its season; ties me to my home, My race, my time, my nation, and my creed So closely that if I but slip my wrist Out of the band that cuts it to the bone, Men say, "He hath a devil;" He has lent All that I hold in trust, as unto one By reason of his weakness and his years Not fit to hold the smallest shred in fee Of those most common things he calls his own,-- And yet--my Rabbi tells me--He has left The care of that to which a million worlds Filled with unconscious life were less than naught, Has left that mighty universe, the Soul, To the weak guidance of our baby hands, Let the foul fiends have access at their will, Taking the shape of angels, to our hearts,-- Our hearts already poisoned through and through With the fierce virus of ancestral sin; Turned us adrift with our immortal charge, To wreck ourselves in gulfs of endless woe.
If what my Rabbi tells me is the truth Why did the choir of angels sing for joy?
Heaven must be compassed in a narrow space, And offer more than room enough for all That pass its portals; but the under-world, The godless realm, the place where demons forge Their fiery darts and adamantine chains, Must swarm with ghosts that for a little while Had worn the garb of flesh, and being heirs Of all the dulness of their stolid sires, And all the erring instincts of their tribe, Nature's own teaching, rudiments of "sin," Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay And cursed with sense enough to lose their souls! Brother, thy heart is troubled at my word; Sister, I see the cloud is on thy brow.
He will not blame me, He who sends not peace, But sends a sword, and bids us strike amain At Error's gilded crest, where in the van Of earth's great army, mingling with the best And bravest of its leaders, shouting loud The battle-cries that yesterday have led The host of Truth to victory, but to-day Are watchwords of the laggard and the slave, He leads his dazzled cohorts.

God has made This world a strife of atoms and of spheres; With every breath I sigh myself away And take my tribute from the wandering wind To fan the flame of life's consuming fire; So, while my thought has life, it needs must burn, And, burning, set the stubble-fields ablaze, Where all the harvest long ago was reaped And safely garnered in the ancient barns.
But still the gleaners, groping for their food, Go blindly feeling through the close-shorn straw, While the young reapers flash, their glittering steel Where later suns have ripened nobler grain! X.
TRUTHS THE time is racked with birth-pangs; every hour Brings forth some gasping truth, and truth newborn Looks a misshapen and untimely growth, The terror of the household and its shame, A monster coiling in its nurse's lap That some would strangle, some would only starve; But still it breathes, and passed from hand to hand, And suckled at a hundred half-clad breasts, Comes slowly to its stature and its form, Calms the rough ridges of its dragon-scales, Changes to shining locks its snaky hair, And moves transfigured into angel guise, Welcomed by all that cursed its hour of birth, And folded in the same encircling arms That cast it like a serpent from their hold! If thou wouldst live in honor, die in peace, Have the fine words the marble-workers learn To carve so well, upon thy funeral-stone, And earn a fair obituary, dressed In all the many-colored robes of praise, Be deafer than the adder to the cry Of that same foundling truth, until it grows To seemly favor, and at length has won The smiles of hard-mouthed men and light-lipped dames; Then snatch it from its meagre nurse's breast, Fold it in silk and give it food from gold; So shalt thou share its glory when at last It drops its mortal vesture, and, revealed In all the splendor of its heavenly form, Spreads on the startled air its mighty wings! Alas! how much that seemed immortal truth That heroes fought for, martyrs died to save, Reveals its earth-born lineage, growing old And limping in its march, its wings unplumed, Its heavenly semblance faded like a dream! Here in this painted casket, just unsealed, Lies what was once a breathing shape like thine, Once loved as thou art loved; there beamed the eyes That looked on Memphis in its hour of pride, That saw the walls of hundred-gated Thebes, And all the mirrored glories of the Nile.
See how they toiled that all-consuming time Might leave the frame immortal in its tomb; Filled it with fragrant balms and odorous gums That still diffuse their sweetness through the air, And wound and wound with patient fold on fold The flaxen bands thy hand has rudely torn! Perchance thou yet canst see the faded stain Of the sad mourner's tear.
XI.
IDOLS BUT what is this?
The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize, Give it a place among thy treasured spoils, Fossil and relic,--corals, encrinites, The fly in amber and the fish in stone, The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold, Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring,-- Place for the Memphian beetle with thine hoard! AM longer than thy creed has blest the world This toy, thus ravished from thy brother's breast, Was to the heart of Mizraim as divine, As holy, as the symbol that we lay On the still bosom of our white-robed dead, And raise above their dust that all may know Here sleeps an heir of glory.