elves
  Who stitched and hammered for the weary man
  In days of old.  And in that piety
  I clothe ungainly forms inherited
  From toiling generations, daily bent
  At desk, or plough, or loom, or in the mine,
  In pioneering labors for the world. 
  Nay, I am apt, when floundering confused
  From too rash flight, to grasp at paradox,
  And pity future men who will not know
  A keen experience with pity blent,
  The pathos exquisite of lovely minds
  Hid in harsh forms—­not penetrating them
  Like fire divine within a common bush
  Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest,
  So that men put their shoes off; but encaged
  Like a sweet child within some thick-walled cell,
  Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars;
  But having shown a little dimpled hand,
  Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts
  Whose eyes keep watch about the prison walls. 
  A foolish, nay, a wicked paradox! 
  For purest pity is the eye of love,
  Melting at sight of sorrow; and to grieve
  Because it sees no sorrow, shows a love
  Warped from its truer nature, turned to love
  Of merest habit, like the miser’s greed. 
  But I am Colin still:  my prejudice
  Is for the flavor of my daily food. 
  Not that I doubt the world is growing still,
  As once it grew from chaos and from night;
  Or have a soul too shrunken for the hope
  Which dawned in human breasts, a double morn,
  With earliest watchings of the rising light
  Chasing the darkness; and through many an age
  Has raised the vision of a future time
  That stands an angel, with a face all mild,
  Spearing the demon.  I, too, rest in faith
  That man’s perfection is the crowning flower
  Towards which the urgent sap in life’s great tree
  Is pressing—­seen in puny blossoms now,
  But in the world’s great morrows to expand
  With broadest petal and with deepest glow.

With no disgust toward the crude and wretched life man everywhere lives to-day, but with pity and tenderness for all sorrow, suffering and struggle, she yet believed that the world is being shaped to a glorious and a mighty destiny.  This faith finds full and clear expression in the concluding lines of the poem just quoted.

   The faith that life on earth is being shaped
   To glorious ends, that order, justice, love,
   Mean man’s completeness, mean effect as sure
   As roundness in the dewdrop—­that great faith
   Is but the rushing and expanding stream
   Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past. 
   Our finest hope is finest memory,
   As they who love in age think youth is blest
   Because it has a life to fill with love. 
   Full souls are double mirrors, making still
   An endless vista of fair things before
   Repeating things behind:  so faith is strong
   Only when we are strong, shrinks when we shrink.