In manhood must he find his competence;
In his clear mind the spiritual food: 
God being there while he his fight maintains;
Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,
While he rejects the suicide despair;
Accepts the spur of explicable pains;
Obedient to Nature, not her slave: 
Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;
Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,
And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:-
Whence Evil in a world unread before;
That mystery to simple springs resolved. 
His God the Known, diviner to adore,
Shows Nature’s savage riddles kindly solved. 
Inconscient, insensitive, she reigns
In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face. 
Back to the primal brute shall he retrace
His path, doth he permit to force her chains
A soft Persuader coursing through his veins,
An icy Huntress stringing to the chase: 
What one the flash disdains;
What one so gives it grace.

But is he rightly manful in her eyes,
A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,
A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,
Desireing and desireable he shines;
As peaches, that have caught the sun’s uprise
And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines. 
Earth fills him with her juices, without fear
That she will cast him drunken down the steeps. 
All woman is she to this man most dear;
He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps: 
She conscient, she sensitive, in him;
With him enwound, his brave ambition hers: 
By him humaner made; by his keen spurs
Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb,
Her crazy adoration of big thews,
Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,
Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world
In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.

This man, this hero, works not to destroy;
This godlike—­as the rock in ocean stands; —
He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands
Creative; in his edifice has joy. 
How strength may serve for purity is shown
When he himself can scourge to make it clean. 
Withal his pitch of pride would not disown
A sober world that walks the balanced mean
Between its tempters, rarely overthrown: 
And such at times his army’s march has been.

Near is he to great Nature in the thought
Each changing Season intimately saith,
That nought save apparition knows the death;
To the God-lighted mind of man ’tis nought. 
She counts not loss a word of any weight;
It may befal his passions and his greeds
To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,
But life gone breathless will she reinstate.

Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,
When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,
Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,
Strike camp, and onward, like the wind’s cloud-fleets. 
Unresting she, unresting he, from change
To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;
She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,
Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.