These are fine colors woven in a grey
And tattered fabric.
THADDEUS.
Grant you not as well
A value to a life that's lost! The lad
That struck out in the storm without a star,
Or faintest glimmer of a port, that took
His orders with blanched cheeks, yet with a heart
That pumped its resolution through young limbs,
Untaxed till now by paths wherein the errand
Failed by fore-doom of the sure goal—think you,
That with his eyes made blind before he struck
The highway, when his senses clouded fast
With the delusions of ungoverned winds,
That falling here, somewhere around the place
Of starting, he should then be counted out,
His life not worth the value of a smile?
JULIAN.
This tangled, sacrificial thread has grown
Till it has thickened to a scourge that bears
No discipline in human fashionings.
THADDEUS.
Causes lost awhile on earth try out
On new arenas fiercer qualities.
They are re-born upon the air; they storm
The souls of men; find homes in thunder peals;
Are hitched to lightnings. Slain, they rise again
With such forged temper that they turn aside
The opposing edge of armouries of steel.
Marks he the issue well, who sees here naught
Save huge world-fires upon whose smouldering ruins
Man's hand has lost its cunning to re-build,
Or that the piles new-reared shall fall once more
In the mad blasts that periodic run
Their cycles of decay? May not the eye
Range over those dun fields of death and see,
From vile putrescence, beauty rise in light
Unquenchable? May not the scar remind
The sufferer of his healing as of wound?
JULIAN.
Look how in cluttered heaps the crosses rise,
Stacked pile on pile, until they twist and sag
The rivets on the bolted doors of God.
This is a storm beyond imaginings,
Unknown to land or sea. Were waves and gales
The only agents of man's ruin, then
The chance might fall upon his side—the fight
With nature growing simpler every hour,
Her ways being known; but when the struggle takes
Its eddying fortunes in these blinded routes,
Not once, nor twice, as though an incident
Of casual kind had touched man's history,
But as a baffling epidemic strikes
A thousand times his life, failure of cure—
How strike this foul, insistent integer
Clean from his life? ... The taint is in the blood.
II