You speak as one too weary to be just.
I hear the guns—I see the greed and lust.
The death throes of a giant evil fill
The air with riot and confusion. Ill
Ofttimes makes fallow ground for Good; and Wrong
Builds Right’s foundation, when it grows too strong.
Pregnant with promise is the hour, and grand
The trust you leave in my all-willing hand.
The Old Century
As one who throws a flickering taper’s ray
To light departing feet, my shadowed way
You brighten with your faith. Faith makes the man
Alas, that my poor foolish age outran
Its early trust in God! The death of art
And progress follows, when the world’s hard heart
Casts out religion. ’Tis the human brain
Men worship now, and heaven, to them, means—gain.
The New Century
Faith is not dead, tho’ priest and creed may pass,
For thought has leavened the whole unthinking mass,
And man looks now to find the God within.
We shall talk more of love, and less of sin,
In this new era. We are drawing near
Unatlassed boundaries of a larger sphere.
With awe, I wait, till Science leads us on,
Into the full effulgence of its dawn.
DEATH HAS CROWNED HIM A MARTYR
(Written on the day of President McKinley’s death)
In the midst of sunny waters, lo! the mighty Ship of State
Staggers, bruised and torn and wounded by a derelict of fate,
One that drifted from its moorings in the anchorage of hate.
On the deck our noble Pilot, in the glory of his prime,
Lies in woe-impelling silence, dead before his hour or time,
Victim of a mind self-centred in a Godless fool of crime.
One of earth’s dissension-breeders, one of Hate’s unreasoning tools,
In the annals of the ages, when the world’s hot anger cools,
He who sought for Crime’s distinction shall be known as Chief of Fools.