Meanwhile out of that inner heat
That thrills anon the human kind
And rends the cold, incrusting sheet
Of stale traditions, lies enshrined,
Accords of jealous interest,
Hatreds of race, and bastard rights,
And every influence unblest
The bloom of human love that blights—
Out of the soul’s hot inner cell
Breaks forth implacable a curse,
The curse of him who loveth well—
Of all the curses none is worse.
IV.
Accurs-ed be all they that hate
Their brother, so to serve their God!
Soon had I cursed thy name, O Fate,
Had I not seen thee ready shod,
The besom in thy seasoned hand,
To sweep six centuries of the Turk
Out of a desecrated land!
Woe be to him who stays thy work!
Yea, woe unto the recreant tribe
That hath no legion for the Lord;
That for a warrior sends a scribe
To palter with a prodigal ward!
Where is your manhood, O ye States?
Ye Governments that govern down
All in the soul that elevates!
Ye hypocrites who, prudent, frown
On sympathy that warms the breast,
And boast you of the devilish grace,
Save in the name of interest
Ye meddle with your neighbors not!
Ten fleets to guard a gilded pot,
Not one to lift a bruised race!
V.
Time was when power of sentiment
Fired Europe with a frenzied zeal;
The stars out of their courses went
For what the Christian heart did feel.
Then babes with mail-ed knights did vie
To rescue from the Infidel
The place where once their Lord did lie,
A rended shroud, an empty shell.
Fanatics were they, minds distraught;
And yet meseems did body there
Some energy of noble thought,
Some prescience of a holy care
Of man for man, to be fulfilled
As man grows more and symbol less,
And sympathy no more is killed
By creed’s intolerable duress—
By the duress of creed and greed
And race and rank and worn-out codes.
Awake, O Man, and find thee freed!
Stand up from under thy brute loads!
Be thou thyself and claim descent
From the eternal Great and True!
Were but some dawning glimmer lent
Thy mind of what thou art and who,
Thy spirit with amaze should sink
And sit astonied one whole day,
Then from the vision new life drink,
And, casting its dead past away,
Rise in a glowing golden youth
To share the omnipotence of love,
The immortality of truth!
The quick ideal thy choice should move,
And not the fossiled precedent;
Reason set free should free the heart,
And with thy being’s full consent,
Thy powers no longer vainly spent,
Shouldst thou fulfill thy natal part!
VI.
In vain! in vain! I learned erewhile
Man rises not on high with wings,
But creeps the circuit of a mile
To rise a foot in spiritual things.
Even so, O Christian man! are still
Too few of tutoring leagues behind
To set thee on the little hill
Where common justice rules the mind,
Where plain humanity has sway—
Yea, even on some level higher,
Where pity doth her weeping stay,
And love offended lights a fire
That heateth judgment seven times hot
Against the bigot’s cruel ire,
Which love or reason toucheth not?
By Heaven! hast thou no heart as yet,
I’d think thy nerves would set thee wild
At sight of rapine without let,
Of slaughtered man and maid defiled,
Of homeless mother, starving child,
And of a patriotic race
Crushed in its ancient dwelling place!
VII.
In one regard I plainly see
Thou hast betimes great progress made;
Religious prejudice for thee
Hath in its sepulcher been laid.
It grieves thee not that they who praise
A prophet whom thou countest none,
Afflict a land, from ancient days
Holding the faith which is thine own.
But pride thee not in progress such;
It is the progress of disease,
That holds thee in its numbing clutch
And soon thy vital parts shall freeze.
If thou wert truly tolerant
Thy blood within thy veins would boil
That creed, the worst or best, should plant
Its foot on an unwilling soil.
It is not breadth but policy
That holdeth back the avenging hand;
Of all the Turks the worst is he
Of Christian name in Christian land.