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Within your far-rapt seer's eyes

I catch the glow of the wild surmise

That played on the Santa Maria's prow
In that still gray dawn,

Four centuries gone,

When a world from the wave began to rise.
Oh, who shall foretell what high emprise
Is the goal that gleams

When Italy's dreams

Spread wing and sweep into the skies?

Cæsar dreamed him a world ruled well;

Dante dreamed Heaven out of Hell;

Angelo brought us there to dwell;

And you, are you of a different birth?—
You're only a "dago," and "scum o' the earth"!

IV

Stay, are we doing you wrong
Calling you "scum o' the earth,"
Man of the sorrow-bowed head,
Of the features tender yet strong,—
Man of the eyes full of wisdom and mystery
Mingled with patience and dread?

Have not I known you in history,
Sorrow-bowed head?

Were you the poet-king, worth
Treasures of Ophir unpriced?

Were you the prophet, perchance, whose art
Foretold how the rabble would mock

That shepherd of spirits, ere long,
Who should gather the lambs to his heart
And tenderly feed his flock?

Man-lift that sorrow-bowed head...
Behold, the face of the Christ!

The vision dies at its birth.

You're merely a butt for our mirth. You're a "sheeny"-and therefore despised And rejected as "scum o' the earth."

V

Countrymen, bend and invoke

Mercy for us blasphemers,

For that we spat on these marvellous folk, Nations of darers and dreamers,

Scions of singers and seers,

Our peers, and more than our peers.
"Rabble and refuse," we name them
And "scum o' the earth," to shame them.
Mercy for us of the few, young years,
Of the culture so callow and crude,
Of the hands so grasping and rude,
The lips so ready for sneers

At the sons of our ancient more-than-peers.
Mercy for us who dare despise

Men in whose loins our Homer lies;

Mothers of men who shall bring to us

The glory of Titian, the grandeur of Huss;

Children in whose frail arms may rest

Prophets and singers and saints of the West.

Newcomers all from the eastern seas,
Help us incarnate dreams like these.
Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong.
Help us to father a nation strong

In the comradeship of an equal birth,

In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth.

From PASSAGE TO INDIA

Passage to India!

BY WALT WHITMAN

Lo, soul! seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann'd, connected by net-work,
The people to become brothers and sisters,

The races, neighbors, to marry and to be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.

THE MAN WITH THE HOE

BY EDWIN MARKHAM

(Written after seeing Millet's World-Famous Painting of a brutalized toiler)

God made man in His own image,

in the image of God made He him.-Genesis.

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;

To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?

Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And markt their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf

There is no shape more terrible than this

More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed

More filled with signs and portents for the soul—

More packt with danger to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Thru this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Thru this dread shape humanity betrayed,

Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quencht?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;

Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings-
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

THE SECOND COMING

BY NORMAN GALE

The Saviour came. With trembling lips

He counted Europe's battleships.
"Yet millions lack their daily bread.

So much for Calvary!" He said.

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