“But whether in calm or wrack-wreath, whether by dark or day,
    I heave them whole to the conger or rip their plates away,
    First of the scattered legions, under a shrieking sky,
    Dipping between the rollers, the English Flag goes by.

   “The dead dumb fog hath wrapped it—­the frozen dews have kissed—­
    The naked stars have seen it, a fellow-star in the mist. 
    What is the Flag of England?  Ye have but my breath to dare,
    Ye have but my waves to conquer.  Go forth, for it is there!”

RUDYARD KIPLING.

 THE MAN WITH THE HOE.

“The Man With the Hoe” is purely an American product, and every
 American ought to be proud of it, for we want no such type allowed to be developed in this country as the low-browed peasant of France.  This poem is a stroke of genius.  The story goes that it so offended a modern plutocrat that he offered a reward of $10,000 to any one who could write an equally good poem in rebuttal.  “The Man With the Hoe” has won for Edwin Markham the title of “Poet Laureate of the Labouring
 Classes.”

 WRITTEN AFTER SEEING THE PAINTING BY MILLET.

 God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He
 him.—­GENESIS.

    Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
    Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
    The emptiness of ages in his face,
    And on his back the burden of the world. 
    Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
    A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
    Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? 
    Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? 
    Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? 
    Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

    Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
    To have dominion over sea and land;
    To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
    To feel the passion of Eternity? 
    Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
    And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? 
    Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
    There is no shape more terrible than this—­
    More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—­
    More filled with signs and portents for the soul—­
    More fraught with menace to the universe.

    What gulfs between him and the seraphim! 
    Slave of the wheel of labour, what to him
    Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? 
    What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
    The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? 
    Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
    Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
    Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
    Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,
    Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
    A protest that is also prophecy.