They had sung the song how very long
Of Love and Faith and Truth:
And they polished fine till it ran as wine,
With never a spot uncouth.
Mellow it spread with softened tread
To the beat of the perfect time--
Chastened and blest and colorless
In stilted, vapid rhyme.
Songs of love that the angels above
Laughed as they bended near--
Songs of fight that the men of might
Sneered as they stopped to hear--
Till a stronger people rising--
They cast the cant aside,
And they lifted free for the open sea
Where the plunging porpoise ride.
For there lifted free from the open sea
The voice of a bard who knew,
And he brought them tales from the spouting whales
Where only the lean gulls flew.
And he brought them tales from the coral bight
Where the lilac waters spend,
And the ceaseless sift of the phosphor drift
Where the palm-lined beaches bend.
But better than all through the endless pall
His clear-shot wordings ran,
And the tale he bore by peace and war
Was the heart of his fellow-man.
Under the ragged raiment--
Under the silken sheen--
They caught the worth of the spinning Earth,
And the black and the gold between.
For ’neath a coat of roughest hide,
And ’neath the rugged brink,
He covered whole the yearning Soul--
The Soul of the Men Who Think.
The Little Things with mystic wings
That flitting merrily,
Bind West and East and best and least,
From sea to outer sea.
The Little Things with mystic wings,
Hidden the eons through--
From his Children’s gaze he swept the haze,
And his Children seeing--knew
Each throbbing lane of pulse and brain--
The far-flung Brotherhood:
The thoughts untold and the hopes unrolled--
And they answered him where they stood:
“In measures strong we’ve heard your song,
And the warm blood mounts again;
And we scorn the beat of the stifled street
And strike for the open main.
“Far back--far back--we leave the plains
To the little hurrying hosts,
And over the seas in the scud-wet breeze
We lift for the Land o’ Ghosts.
“For the Land o’ Ghosts and the laughing coasts
And the goal we hope to win--
Though ne’er we reach the beckoning beach,
Ye have let us look within.
* * * * *
“Though ne’er we reach the beckoning beach--
Though it fades ere we leap to land,
Ye have made us rife with the strength of life--
Ye have spoke ... and we understand.”