For aught that my eyes can discern,
    Your God is what you think good—­
  Yourself flashed back from the glass
    When the light pours on it in flood.

  You preach to me to be just,
    And this is His realm, you say;
  And the good are dying with hunger,
    And the bad gorge every day.

  You say that He loveth mercy,
    And the famine is not yet gone;
  That He hateth the shedder of blood
    And He slayeth us every one.

  You say that my soul shall live,
    That the spirit can never die: 
  If He was content when I was not,
    Why not when I have passed by?

  You say I must have a meaning: 
    So must dung, and its meaning is flowers;
  What if our souls are but nurture
    For lives that are greater than ours?

  When the fish swims out of the water,
    When the birds soar out of the blue,
  Man’s thoughts may transcend man’s knowledge,
    And your God be no reflex of you!

One night in after life I sat with Grant Harlson, in his rooms in a great city, and he told me of this, his time of doubt and tribulation, and repeated to me the poem.

“The questions it asks have not yet been answered, so far as I know,” said he, “and I do not think they can be by the alleged experts in such things.”

Then a sudden fancy seized him, and he broke out with a novel proposition: 

“You have little to do to-morrow, nor have I much on my hands.  Speaking of this to you has awakened an old interest in me and made me curious.  Help me to-morrow.  We’ll make up now a list of twenty leading clergymen.  I know most of them personally, and some of them can reason.  We’ll each take a cab and each visit ten, exhibiting these verses, going over them stanza by stanza, explaining the doubts they have aroused, and asking for such solution as the clergymen have, and such solace as it may afford.  That will be rather an interesting experiment, will it not?”

I fell in with his whim, and the next day we made the rounds agreed upon.

What a curious thing it was!  How men of various creeds felt confident and repeated the old platitudes, and would be anything but logical!  How one or two were honest, and said they could not answer.

And how absurd, we said at night, the keeping of men to tell us what can no more be learned in a theological school than in a blacksmith shop, and in neither place as well as in the woods or on the sea!  Yet there was no scoffing in it.  We were neither irreligious.

To this young man building the fence there came a resisting mood, and he was puzzled still, but slept more pleasantly again upon his clover-mow.  He was groping, but less despondent, that was all.  It seemed all strange to him, for the old farm life had become largely a memory, and it was but yesterday that he was in college, one of a thousand, full of all energy and lightsomeness, and here he was alone in the wood as in a monastery, and all else was somehow like a dream.  Only the oxen and the logs and the ax and the maul and the growing fence were real by day.  But, in the evening, there was Jenny Bierce, and she was very real, as well as charming.