Are the Heroes Dead?
Helen Lee Sargent.
“We are low,—we are base!” sigh the singers,
“The heroes have long been dead!
The times have fallen,—the state is sick,
And the glory of earth has fled!
Sordid and selfish on every side
Walk the men and the women we know.
Downward we tend continually,
And faster and faster go!”
Shame to ye, shame to ye, singers!
And have ye never known
That the soul of man has been ever the same
Since the sun of heaven shone?
If ye listen and look for the heroes,
Ye will find them everywhere;
But if ye look for the knaves and scamps—
It is true they are not rare.
But whenever a ship is lost at sea,
Or a building burns on land,
Amid the terror and death and loss
A hero is found at hand.
And if ever a war should come again
(From it long may we be freed!)
Ye will find the heroes, as ever before,
Responding to the need.
Failed!
a poem of hard times.
Phillips Thompson.
Failed! Jim Miserton failed! You don’t mean to say it’s so?
Had it from Smith at the Bank? Well, he’s a man that should know.
Forty-two cents on the dollar? I cannot believe my ears.
There’s no such thing as judging a man by the way he appears.
Yes, you may well say “failed;” there’s more than the term implies,
When all there is of a man in a hopeless ruin lies.
To come after twenty years of a stubborn up-hill strife,
It isn’t a business smash so much as a failure in life.
Gold was always his god—he’d nothing else in his soul;
Money, for money’s sake, was ever his ultimate goal.
A “self-made man” they styled him, for low and poor he began;
But now his money has vanished, and what is left of the man?
He had no eye for beauty, for literature no taste;
Buying pictures or books he counted a shameful waste.
Nothing he cared for art or the poet’s elaborate rhymes;
His soul was only attuned to the musical jingle of dimes.
Selfish, exacting, and stern, a hand he would treat like a slave;
Long were his hours of toil, and scanty the pay that he gave;
Made of cast-iron himself, his zeal in the struggle for gold
Left him no pity to spare for those of a different mold.
Never a cent for the poor, for the naked never a stitch;
’Twas all their fault, he would say; they should save like him, and grow rich.
Now and then to a church he’d forward a liberal amount,
Duly set down in his books to the advertising account.
So he succeeded, of course, and piled his coffers with wealth,
Missing pleasure and culture, losing vigor and health;
Now he’s down at the bottom, exactly where he began;
Even his gold has vanished, and what is left of the man?
A self-made man, indeed! then we owe no honor to such;
The genuine self-made man you cannot honor too much;
But be sure what you make is a man—with a heart, and a soul, and a mind,
Not merely a pile of dollars, that goes, leaving nothing behind.