* * * * *

Therefore of Europe now I will not doubt,
For the broad foreheads surely win the day, 60
And brains, not crowns or soul-gelt armies, weigh
In Fortune’s scales:  such dust she brushes out. 
Most gracious are the conquests of the Word,
Gradual and silent as a flower’s increase,
And the best guide from old to new is Peace—­
Yet, Freedom, than canst sanctify the sword!

Bravely to do whate’er the time demands,
Whether with pen or sword, and not to flinch,
This is the task that fits heroic hands;
So are Truth’s boundaries widened inch by inch. 70

I do not love the Peace which tyrants make;
The calm she breeds let the sword’s lightning break! 
It is the tyrants who have beaten out
Ploughshares and pruning-hooks to spears and swords,
And shall I pause and moralize and doubt? 
Whose veins run water let him mete his words! 
Each fetter sundered is the whole world’s gain! 
And rather than humanity remain
A pearl beneath the feet of Austrian swine,
Welcome to me whatever breaks a chain. 80
That surely is of God, and all divine!

BIBLIOLATRES

Bowing thyself in dust before a Book,
And thinking the great God is thine alone,
O rash iconoclast, thou wilt not brook
What gods the heathen carves in wood and stone,
As if the Shepherd who from the outer cold
Leads all his shivering lambs to one sure fold
Were careful for the fashion of his crook.

There is no broken reed so poor and base,
No rush, the bending tilt of swamp-fly blue,
But He therewith the ravening wolf can chase,
And guide his flock to springs and pastures new;
Through ways unloosed for, and through many lands,
Far from the rich folds built with human hands,
The gracious footprints of his love I trace.

And what art thou, own brother of the clod,
That from his hand the crook wouldst snatch away
And shake instead thy dry and sapless rod,
To scare the sheep out of the wholesome day? 
Yea, what art thou, blind, unconverted Jew,
That with thy idol-volume’s covers two
Wouldst make a jail to coop the living God?

Thou hear’st not well the mountain organ-tone
By prophet ears from Hor and Sinai caught,
Thinking the cisterns of those Hebrew brains
Drew dry the springs of the All-knower’s thought,
Nor shall thy lips be touched with living fire,
Who blow’st old altar-coals with sole desire
To weld anew the spirit’s broken chains.

God is not dumb, that He should speak no more;
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness
And find’st not Sinai, ’tis thy soul is poor;
There towers the Mountain of the Voice no less,
Which whoso seeks shall find, but he who bends,
Intent on manna still and mortal ends,
Sees it not, neither hears its thundered lore.