Bismarck--or rapt Beethoven with his dreams:
Ah, which was blind? Or which bespoke his race?--
That breed which nurtured Heine’s haunting grace,
And Goethe, mastering Olympic themes
Of meditation, Mozart’s golden gleams,
And Leibnitz charting realms of time and space,
Great-hearted Schiller, and that fairy brace
Of brothers who first trailed the goblin streams.
Bismarck for these builded an iron tomb,
And clanged the door, and turned a kaiser’s key;
And simple folk that once danced merrily
Their May-ring rites, march now in roaring gloom
Toward that renascent dawn when the black womb
Of buried guns gives birth to Germany.
_Boston Transcript_ _Percy MacKaye_