The peacock had listened with bated emotion,
While each indicated and stated his notion;
But when they were done, he screeched out with a flout,
"You, none of you, know what you're talking about!"
With which allegation he gravely begun
To strut up and down, back and forth, in the sun,
And spread out his frail and great, glimmering tail,
Till it shone like a beautiful, shimmering veil.
"Excuse me," he said, in tones harsh and discordant,
Ill-concealing a feeling sarcastic and mordant
That listeners all noted, "if, I implore you,
I perambulate gorgeously round here before you,
To show you that beauty of plumage and figure
Have nothing in common with prosaic vigor;
Creation, which wisely decreed that the feet
Were made to be used in the dust of the street,
Has, also, ordained that they shall sustain
Superior cellular tissue and brain
Above and away from the gross things of earth,—
Evincing, thereby, a superlative birth;
And why should I be, then, so terribly blamed,
If I, of my feet, am a good deal ashamed;"
As he ended, the floor of the sand-pit he spurned,
And abruptly announced arbitration adjourned.
Although no agreement was reached, as a whole,
Discussion is generally good for the soul;
The ostrich, ere adjudication was through,
Unconsciously passing his acts in review,
Had arrived, independently, at the decision,
That he'd been a fool; and he laughed in derision,
To think he'd permitted his weak self-conceit,
To lead him to pecking his own faithful feet.
XIII.
The waiting knight, emblem of the new manhood just entering upon its estate of resolution and responsibility, is the type of a generation now setting forth in quest of high and honorable adventure. Satan is at his back, thrusting forward a bag of gold and counselling the pursuit of wealth; "Put money in thy purse!" saith the devil; "all else counts but little,—put money in thy purse!" At his left hand stands the priest in his splendid robes of office, proffering the symbol of suffering and self-renunciation. The knight sees the frozen church with ascetic and veiled superstition as its hand-maidens; the star of Bethlehem still shines out of the dark upon a mighty hand reaching out of the clouds to shake to its foundations the edifice of Christ, emblazoned with the letter and the creed, but supported by the pomp and pride of a purely material world. "The zeal of his house hath eaten him up," and in the majestic temple sits the money changer, absorbed in his trade and his material enterprises. Before him kneels the imploring angel of Freedom, raising the flag of the great republic, with all its portents and promises, symbolically arrayed in its stripes and stars. Uncle Sam is but a puzzled and quizzical spectator of future events.
XIV.
The battle between the head and the feet results, at last, in the fall of Satan, that is, Self, under the God-principle of self-renunciation, working in all human creeds and canticles, foreshadowing the unity of the race in the power of the religious idea that has, at last, become dominant in the head. The cross, no longer an emblem of suffering but of power, unites with the crown in a final union of church and state. Here behold the wedded bliss of the long divorced pair, presaging a new and glorified race of man. Then, indeed, the baptismal story of man's hoary and ancient glory in Eden shall usher in that gracious day, when the lamb and the lion shall gambol together, and there shall be in all the earth neither murder, nor theft, nor plunder, nor war.
