Pronounced Soo; a name given to the Dakotas in early days by the French traders.
MEN
Man is a creature of a thousand whims;
The slave of hope and fear and circumstance.
Through toil and martyrdom a million years
Struggling and groping upward from the brute,
And ever dragging still the brutish chains,
And ever slipping backward to the brute.
Shall he not break the galling, brazen bonds
That bind him writhing on the wheel of fate?
Long ages groveling with his brother brutes,
He plucked the tree of knowledge and uprose
And walked erect—a god; but died the death:
For knowledge brings but sadness and unrest
Forever, insatiate longing and regret.
Behold the brute's unerring instinct guides
True as the pole-star, while man's reason leads
How oft to quicksands and the hidden reefs!
Contented brute, his daily wants how few!
And these by Nature's mother-hand supplied.
Man's wants unnumbered and unsatisfied,
And multiplied at every onward step—
Insatiate as the cavernous maw of time.
His real wants how simple and how few!
Behold the kine in yonder pasture-field
Cropping the clover, or in rest reclined,
Chewing meek-eyed the cud of sweet content.
Ambition plagues them not, nor hope, nor fear;
No demons fright them and no cruel creeds;
No pangs of disappointment or remorse.
See man the picture of perpetual want,
The prototype of all disquietude;
Full of trouble, yet ever seeking more;
Between the upper and the nether stone
Ground and forever in the mill of fate.
Nature and art combine to clothe his form,
To feed his fancy and to fill his maw;
And yet the more they give the more he craves.
Give him the gold of Ophir, still he delves;
Give him the land, and he demands the sea;
Give him the earth—he reaches for the stars.
Doomed by his fate to scorn the good he has
And grasp at fancied good beyond his reach,
He seeks for silver in the distant hills
While in the sand gold glitters at his feet.
O man, thy wisdom is but folly still;
Wiser the brute and full of sweet content.
The wit and wisdom of five thousand years—What
are they but the husks we feed upon,
While beast and bird devour the golden grain?
Lo for the brutes dame Nature sows and tills;
For them the Tuba-tree of Paradise
Bends with its bounties free and manifold;
For them the fabled fountain Salsabil,
Gushes pure wine that sparkles as it runs,
And fair Al Cawthar flows with creamy milk.
But man, forever doomed to toil and sweat,
Digs the hard earth and casts his seeds therein,
And hopes the harvest;—how oft he hopes in vain!
Weeds choke, winds blast, and myriad pests devour,
The hot sun withers and the floods destroy.
Unceasing labor, vigilance and care
Reward him here and there with bounteous store.
Had man the blessed wisdom of content,
Happy were he—as wise Horatius sung—
To whom God gives enough with sparing hand.
Of all the crops by sighing mortals sown,
And watered with man's sweat and woman's tears,
There is but only one that never fails
In drouth or flood, on fat or flinty soil,
On Nilus' banks or Scandia's stony hills—
The plenteous, never-stinted crop of fools.
So hath it been since erst aspiring man
Broke from the brute and plucked the fatal tree,
And will be till eternity grows gray.
Princes and parasites comprise mankind:
To one wise prince a million parasites;
The most uncommon thing is common-sense;
A truly wise man is a freak of nature.
The herd are parasites of parasites
That blindly follow priest or demagogue,
Himself blind leader of the blind. The wise
Weigh words, but by the yard fools measure them.
The wise beginneth at the end; the fool
Ends at the beginning, or begins anew:
Aye, every ditch is full of after-wit.
Folly sows broad cast; Wisdom gathers in,
And so the wise man fattens on the fool,
And from the follies of the foolish learns
Wisdom to guide himself and bridle them.
"To-morrow I made my fortune," cries the fool,
"To-day I'll spend it." Thus will Folly eat
His chicken ere the hen hath laid the egg.
So Folly blossoms with promises all the year—
Promises that bud and blossom but to blast.
"All men are fools," said Socrates, the wise,
And in the broader sense I grant it true,
For even Socrates had his Xanthipp'.
Whose head is wise oft hath a foolish heart;
The wisest has more follies than he needs;
Wisdom and madness, too, are near akin.
The marrow-maddening canker-worm of love
Feeds on the brains of wise men as on fools'.
The wise man gathers wisdom from all men
As bees their honey hive from plant and weed.
Yea, from the varied history of the world,
From the experience of all times, all men,
The wise man learneth wisdom. Folly learns
From his own bruises if he learns at all.
The fool—born wise—what need hath he to learn?
He needs but gabble wisdom to the world:
Grill him on a gridiron and he gabbles still.
Wise men there are—wise in the eyes of men—
Who cram their hollow heads with ancient wit
Cackled in Carthage, babbled in Babylon,
Gabbled in Greece and riddled in old Rome,
And never coin a farthing of their own.
Wise men there are—for owls are counted wise—
Who love to leave the lamp-lit paths behind,
And chase the shapeless shadow of a doubt.
Too wise to learn, too wise to see the truth,
E'en though it glow and sparkle like a gem
On God's outstretched forefinger for all time.
These have one argument, and only one,
For good or evil, earth or jeweled heaven—
The olden, owlish argument of doubt.
Ah, he alone is wise who ever stands
Armed cap-a-pié with God's eternal truth.
Where Grex is Rex God help the hapless land.
The yelping curs that bay the rising moon
Are not more clamorous, and the fitful winds
Not more inconstant. List the croaking frogs
That raise their heads in fen or stagnant pool,
Shouting at eve their wisdom from the mud.
Beside the braying, bleating, bellowing mob,
Their jarring discords are sweet harmony.
The headless herd are but a noise of wind;
Sometimes, alas, the wild tornado's roar.
As full of freaks as curs are full of fleas,
Like gnats they swarm, like flies they buzz and breed.
Thought works in silence: Wisdom stops to think.
No ass so obstinate as ignorance.
Oft as they seize the ship of state, behold—
Overboard goes all ballast and they crowd
To blast or breeze or hurricane full sail,
Each dunce a pilot and a captain too.
How often cross-eyed Justice hits amiss!
Doomed by Athenian mobs to banishment,
See Aristides leave the land he saved:
Wisdom his fault and justice his offense.
See Caesar crowned a god and Tully slain;
See Paris red with riot and noble blood,
A king beheaded and a monster throned,—
King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds,
Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine,
Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf
Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine.
Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France,
While human wolves howl ruin round their walls.
Contention hisses from a million mouths,
And from ten thousand muttering craters smokes
The smell of sulphur. Gaul becomes a ghoul;
While Parlez-Tous in hot palaver holds
Hubbub ad Bedlam—Pandemonium thriced.
There, voices drowning voice with frantic cries,
Discord demented flaps her ruffled wings
And shrieks delirium to her screeching brood.
Sneer-lipped, hawk-eyed, wolf-tongued oraculars—
Wise-wigs, Girondins, frothing Jacobins—
Reason to madness run, tongues venom-tanged—
Howl chaos all with one united throat.
Maelstrom of madness, lazar-howled, hag-shrilled!
Quack quackles quack; all doctors disagree,
While Doctor Guillotine's huge scalpel heads
Hell-dogs beheading helpless innocents.
The very babes bark rabies. Journalism,
Moon-mad, green-eyed, hound-scented, lupus-tongued
On howls the pack and smells her bread in blood.