Than in a cycle of New England sloth,
Broke only by a petty Indian war,
Or quarrel for a letter more or less
In some hard word, which, spelt in either way, 190
Not their most learned clerks can understand. 
New times demand new measures and new men;
The world advances, and in time outgrows
The laws that in our fathers’ day were best;
And, doubtless, after us, some purer scheme
Will be shaped out by wiser men than we,
Made wiser by the steady growth of truth. 
We cannot hale Utopia on by force;
But better, almost, be at work in sin,
Than in a brute inaction browse and sleep. 200
No man is born into the world whose work
Is not born with him; there is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will;
And blessed are the horny hands of toil! 
The busy world stoves angrily aside
The man who stands with arms akimbo set,
Until occasion tells him what to do;
And he who waits to have his task marked out
Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled. 
Our time is one that calls for earnest deeds; 210
Season and Government, like two broad seas,
Yearn for each other with outstretched arms
Across this narrow isthmus of the throne,
And roll their white surf higher every day. 
One age moves onward, and the next builds up
Cities and gorgeous palaces, where stood
The rude log-huts of those who tamed the wild,
Rearing from out the forests they had felled
The goodly framework of a fairer state;
The builder’s trowel and the settler’s axe 220
Are seldom wielded by the selfsame hand;
Ours is the harder task, yet not the less
Shall we receive the blessing for our toil
From the choice spirits of the aftertime. 
My soul is not a palace of the past,
Where outworn creeds, like Rome’s gray senate, quake,
Hearing afar the Vandal’s trumpet hoarse,
That shakes old systems with a thunder-fit. 
That time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change;
Then let it come:  I have no dread of what 230
Is called for by the instinct of mankind;
Nor think I that God’s world will fall apart
Because we tear a parchment more or less. 
Truth Is eternal, but her effluence,
With endless change, is fitted to the hour;
Her mirror is turned forward to reflect
The promise of the future, not the past. 
He who would win the name of truly great
Must understand his own age and the next,
And make the present ready to fulfil 240
Its prophecy, and with the future merge
Gently and peacefully, as wave with wave. 
The future works out great men’s purposes;
The present is enough, for common souls,
Who, never looking forward, are indeed
Mere clay, wherein the footprints of their age
Are petrified forever; better those
Who lead the blind old giant by the hand
From out the pathless desert where he gropes,
And set him onward in his darksome way, 250