UMANITIES GONE AND TO GOME AN ADDRESS Felix E. Schelling AD ASTRA : AN ODE Francis Howard Williams Read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Delta of Pennsylvania at Houston Hall The University of Pennsylvania June i8, 1902 HUMANITIES GONE AND TO COME AN ADDRESS Felix E. Schelling AD ASTRA: AN ODE Francis Howard Williams Read before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Delta of Pennsylvania at Houston Hall The University of Pennsylvania June i8, 1902 Uioi SEP 23 1904 D. ot 0, HUMANITIES, GONE AND TO COME. Mr. Chairman, Fellow-Members of Phi Beta Kappa, Ladies and Gentlemen: Nearly five generations of men have come and gone since this society sprang into life ; its purpose the nurture and en- couragement of liberal studies by a public recognition of those whose young steps have begun worthily to tread the pathways of the humanities. The idols that men rear and worship change as men change. And time sheds tears or bestows mockery on the broken images of the ideals that have been but are no more. No symbol that has roused the spirit of human devotion is a thing wholly unworthy or with- out its significance. It is of some of these idols in educa- tion, fallen or yet upright, that I wish briefly to speak to you this afternoon. And I wish especially to dwell on the spirit that reared them on their pedestals and brought them honest devotees, rather than to dilate on the iconoclasm that shattered their beauties in indiscriminate destruction. Retrospect is the privilege of age ; prophecy the foible of youth. I can lay claim to your indulgence for neither. The present is only a passing link in the swiftly running chain of time. It rivets the eye but for a moment. He that neglects the past neglects that which has made him what he is. He that neglects the promises and the warnings of the present as to things to come, as to things which he may help to shape in their coming, is already floating, a mere piece of wreckage on the ocean of time. The humanities, the liberal arts: I suppose that these words call up to the minds of many of us, who are not wholly unlettered, a thing in some manner connected with the study of the classics, a something opposed to science and to the study of nature, a something very impractical (3) and very desirable to possess, if you do not lose bread and butter by it ; a thing much talked of at commencements, and happily, for the most part, forgotten meanwhile. Indeed, the popular conception of the humanities is not unlike an Eton boy's knowledge of Latin and Greek, not so much a definite conception as an ineffaceable impression that there really are such tongues, and that it is a very disagreeable thing to have much to do with them. The humanities ! the very term is redolent of times long gone and smacking of generations before the last. Beside glittering, new-minted epithets like "sociology," "criminology," and "degeneracy," the ver}^ word "humanities" looks dim and faded in this new century which has entered upon its run with' the gathered momentum of a hundred years of effort behind it. No word is constant in its significance ; nor is the expres- sion, "the humanities," an exception to this rule. The hu- manities, "those studies which involve the mental cultiva- tion befitting a man," have varied with the ideal of man- hood; and the man of one age, derided and misunderstood, has often become the caricature of the next. In the Europe of the fourteenth century the idea of "humanity" was habitu- ally contrasted with that of divinity ; and "the humanities" were conceived of as constituting the body of secular learning as distinguished from theological erudition. In that conception of manhood which transmuted each full- grown male into a miniature steel fortress, bristling with weapons and offence, cherishing his honor, his lady and his life supereminently as things to fight for, the humanities could be nothing if they were not unclerical. What had chanting priests to do with the graces of courtly young man- hood, any more than they had to do with the exercise of arms or with the grand menage of horses of war? But though this ideal was unclerical, it harked backward to the classics ; for whether it was in the songs of the courts of love, in the romances of chivalrous King Arthur, the Cid or Charle- magne, in protracted discourses on morals, or the calami- ties that had befallen great heroes, the ancients were recog- nized as the only source of that sweet but profane learning wherein the heathen world of old had excelled and to the charm of which all subsequent ages have been fain to sub- scribe. Hence the arts and graces which dignified life and made it beautiful — poetry, music, and the knowledge of tongues, especially the classical tongues, — came, with the Re- naissance, to be recognized as the studies which involved the mental and aesthetic cultivation most properly befitting a man. And, however far the violence and barbarism of the earlier middle ages may have frustrated these ideals from a realization measurably full, their bare existence tended not a little to the amelioration of the social conditions of those times. As the world emerged into the greater stability of modem political life, while adhering as yet to much of the antique charm and picturesqueness of the medieval times, it was to this ideal of cultivated manhood that Sir Philip Sidney con- formed. Among the cares of war, of colonization and state- craft, in assiduous attendance upon an incomparable, but variable and exacting, Queen, Sidney none the less found time to cultivate the humanities in the practice of poetry after the manner of the ancients as well as in the ardent modern Italian way, in the composition of chivalric and pas- toral romance and in the discussion with his friends of Aris- totelian poetics and Machiavellian polity. The paragon of social and political graces, the generous patron of learning, the rare poet and passionate lover, the courtly and chivalrous gentleman, the man of simple and unblemished loyalty and faith, — all of these was Sidney, adored as the example and the idol of his time. And Sidney was so adored because of the perfection with which he fulfilled the Renaissance ideal of the humanities in their efifect on vigorous young English manhood. In the sweeping revisions and restatements to which Lord Bacon submitted all the formulas of his age, the humanities by no means escaped. Neglecting historical significance and current popular notions alike, Bacon retained the contrast 6 between human and divine learning and, by a simple return to roots, defined the humanities as human philosophy : "Which hath," to use his words, "two parts. The one con- sidereth man segregate or distributively, the other congre- gate or in society. Humanity consisteth of knowledges which respect the body and of knowledges which respect the mind." (Advancement of Learning, Bacon's Works, Ed. 1 84 1, II. 201.) In modern parlance it is anatomy, psychol- ogy, and what is now somewhat vaguely called "sociology," which Bacon considered as the threefold humanities or studies appertaining to man; and the last "sociology" (if I may venture again on the use of so disputed a term). Bacon could have conceived only in the logical sense in which it embraces all study of language, literature, history, politics, archaeology and art. We may thus accredit to Bacon a remarkable widening of the earlier conception of the humanities and ascribe to him as well the earliest recognition of science as among them. With the coming of the eighteenth century the conception of the humanities had undergone another transformation. The century opened with the smoke of a momentous contro- versy rolling heavily to windward. This discussion con- cerned the relative merits of ancient and modern learning. Sir William Temple had just succeeded in proving to his own complete satisfaction that the ancients were really the superior poets. To the achievement of this result he was compelled, wittingly or innocently, to omit any mention of the names of Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Cal- deron, Moliere, or Milton. Temple, moreover, enthusiasti- cally praised several Greek writers whose works it may be more than suspected he could not read. Years later, Oliver Goldsmith addressed the world in his "Enquiry Into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe," an inquiry for which that delightful essayist and dramatist was fitted chiefly by his triumphant completion of a protracted career of idle- ness pursued at at least three of the most learned universities of the British Islands and the continent. There were good scholars in the England of the eighteenth century, but the cultivator of the amenities of literature felt that an apology was due the world for his aberrations from the practical highways of life. The great poet, Gray, pre- ferred anonymity to any repute that might come to him as the author of his famous "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ;" and Horace Walpole concealed the authorship of his novel, "The Castle of Otranto," as if it were a flagrant offence for a gentleman to sully his hand with the penning of romance. Indeed, the age which produced such artistic trivialities, such delicate articles of vertu as the letters of this same Horace Walpole or that impeccable code social for the guidance of youth by my Lord Chesterfield, his "Letters," equally artistic and equally fragile — surely such an age could have little need to emphasize the antithesis between "the humanities" and divine learning. But the eighteenth century had its distinctions none the less, and was painfully careful to construct an impenetrable barrier between such knowledge as might be presumed to adhere, like clay, to vulgar, everyday mankind, and the finer humani- ties which could appertain to fastidious gentility alone. "A cad, my son," said an eighteenth century father, in reply to a question as to the habitat and earmarks of that common and unpleasing variety of the human species, "a cad, my son, is a man whose Latin quantities are out at heel. Beware of him." Such was the shibboleth of that age. The word "humanity" had come to mean "polite learning," not the studies which involve the mental cultivation befitting a man, but, emphatically and avowedly, those studies which involve the mental cultivation supposedly appropriate to the fine gentleman. In England the superstition is still cherished that if a young man be carefully trained to pass a competitive exami- nation, winning from his fellows in Catullus or in the frag- ments of the obscurer Greek lyrists, he may somehow prove in time the better ruler for Punjab or Sindh. This super- stition — and is it wholly a superstition ? — is based in part on a sentiment that the gentleman, after all, is very good ma- terial with which to begin. It is the gentleman ordinarily, and not the cad, who has had alike the leisure and, what is far more important, the temper to study Catullus, or the dis- position to expend leisure time on the Greek fragments. And it is the man, after all, that has been developed by these impractical studies ; and, with the man, those lesser things, the gentleman and the potential governor of Punjab or Sindh. Nay, is it in any wise superstitious to believe, in England or elsewhere, that a sword is best whetted on that which it is destined never to cut ? and that without the neces- sary preliminaries of whetting, pointing, and tempering, many a pretty thrust and trick of swordsmanship must prove in the end but vain ? The earliest American college was conceived as a school preparatory to the study of divinity ; for few save the intend- ing clergy could spare the time to acquire learning, on its face a thing so unimperative to the needs of everyday colo- nial life. As time went on it was felt that the languages of Greece and Rome had a value besides their use as lights wherewith to search the Scriptures. With the example of English education before them, with men who had come to the new world with the learning, the habits, and the preju- dices of the universities of England and Scotland, the Ameri- can college set up its ideal of the humanities, and in so doing naturally interpreted the liberal arts to mean primarily the classics, often the classics alone. This ideal has abided despite many attacks, if somewhat battered of late ; and it has shown throughout the period of its maintenance the mingled strength and weakness that dis- tinguishes a principle nearly, but not quite wholly, true. There is little need that I should rehearse to you — who know it so well — the strength of that ideal which upholds the advantages of a classical education ; or tell how we may claim that no modern tongue can afford in its organic struc- ture the discipline of Latin and Greek, in which, in the words 3f John Stuart Mill, "every sentence is a lesson in logic." Nor need I tell how we can view no modern language with the completeness with which we can view these tongues of the past, or with the certainty as to the stability of the scien- tific facts which they present; how the literature of the ancients, especially that of Greece, affords us unequaled examples of the perfection and harmony of literary art, and may as soon be omitted from the study of the student of general literature as antique sculpture may be omitted from the study of art ; or how in the study of ancient philosophy we travel back, so to speak, along those rays of light that have illumined the world for twenty-three centuries to that Greek prism, the crystal sides of which are Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, that centre of light wherein lies focused the concentrated radiance of all human learning. These things are known to most of us and acknowledged by all except those in whom ignorance or want of opportunity has bred contempt for what they have not, or those whom the life- sapping blight of hand-to-mouth utilitarianism has stricken deaf and blind, but unhappily not dumb. ' The opponents of classical studies, if not of the humani- ties in a larger sense, have been for the most part two ; first, the exponents of the superior advantages which they claim for a purely scientific education, and, secondly, the utili- tarians. Who can deny the force of the enticing appeal that bids us return to nature and read in the spacious volume which she lavishly spreads before us year after year the absorbing story of this visible world? Even the demand, sometimes made in the past, that scientific studies be sub- stituted all but wholly for the older humanities might be in a measure excused from that natural and creditable zeal which is born of the fervor of propaganda. Indeed, the demands of these reformers were often not more unreason- able than the replies of men blindly adherent to the traditions of a system of education antiquated and no longer effective. But this warfare is now a thing of the past. No one now denies the value, even the imperative need, for science as an integral part of the education of the day; just as few any 10 longer refuse to recognize the liberalizing influences of the study of our own and of foreign modern tongues. There is no weakness in a strenuous advocacy of a study of the classics ; there is much unwisdom in claiming for the classics alone that liberalizing influence which they possess in so high a degree, but which they share with many other studies. There is positive falsity in the position which some have taken, the attitude of opposition to the study of science ; and there is absolute injustice in the denial of the liberalizing capabilities of a study of the sciences liberally conducted. No subject to which man can give his studious attention, no subject wherein a man may discover truth to add by his dis- covery to the sum of human knowledge or to create there- with newer and juster views than those which obtained before, should be denied a place among the humanities. But the subject must be pursued with that disinterestedness, that freedom from ulterior motives of practical utility, which alone can permit a free play of its liberalizing elements. It is their practical uselessness which has given and will con- tinue to give to the classics, with pure mathematics, aesthet- ics, and philosophy, a palpable advantage over the sciences and modern languages among the humanities. In a word, the measure of the educational value of the humanities lies in their practical inutility. A sword is best whetted on that which it is destined never to cut. And now that this battle is won and science has taken her place beside her sister, the arts, in administering that cultiva- tion which is befitting the man, we begin to recognize to the full the value of this broader conception of the humanities. We have learned that neither our arts nor our young bach- elors are constant quantities to be combined with the inevit- able result of the union of two chemical elements. We have learned that men may be liberalized by the mathematics and biology and remain illiberal in the atrium of Greek poetry or among the arcana of ancient philosophy. We have learned, in short, that men can no more be educated after one pattern than fitted on a single last ; that neither the chival- 11 rous type of Sidney, the virtuosity of Walpole, nor the cleri- cal cut of old New England can suffice for all ages and cli- mates, but that age strides after age and that our ideals in education, like our ideals in all things else, need adaptation to present needs and the exercise of a wise but conservative foresight for the future. Indeed, in the recognition of all this we may now well pause to inquire if the habit of change has not grown inveterate upon us and if, in our zeal to fit the individual at the present moment, we have not lost sight of his own future development and of the relations of each to all. The present is no moment for supine self-congratulation. The humanities to-day are front to front with an attack in comparison with which all previous menaces sink into insig- nificance itself. We have no longer to fight for the study of Greek or to relegate to her proper place the exorbitant claims of the youngest and boldest of the sciences. We are in struggle for the very principle of liberality in education itself, and, worst of all, our enemy is within, and is often a neighbor or a brother. Practical utility is by far the most insidious enemy of modern education and the chiefest barrier to the attainment of that higher intellectual and spiritual life toward which the nobler members of the race are striving. And by utility here I mean not that broad and philosophical outlook which recognizes the ultimate value and potency of all things human by the completeness and success with which each performs its function in life ; but that cheap reckoning up of commercial values, that near-sighted and niggardly view of man and life in the light of petty immediate gains, that reduction of things, both human and divine, to monetary standards which paralyzes liberal and disinterested endeavor and fills our learned professions — save the mark ! — with expert but narrow and unlettered men. Utility in education demands that we hurry our boys into the professional schools before they are ready for college, or thrust them through or out of college before they are old enough to appreciate their advantages. Utility demands that we interlard the humani- 12 ties with technical and professional work by turning as many- studies as possible into their practical applications. Utility demands devices of short cuts and special courses and the invention of specific courses which it is hoped may prove, alluring to the uncultured and the uninformed. In short, utility in education destroys the very ideal for which the uni- versity was created and transforms the institution in which it becomes a ruling incentive from the leader and guide of the community at large into a submissive follower in the Vv^ake of a degenerating public opinion. The excellence of American technical and professional schools is our glory and our pride. Where ingenuity, adap- tability, technical aptitude and energy which tires not nor is daunted are in demand, American technical education need yield to none. If American lawyers are at times a little less grave in their learning, they are more agile in their thought than their cousins across the water; if Ameri- can divines are less frequently historians and philoso- phers than British divines, if American diplomacy is some- what more rough and ready, and a trifle less successful in -finesse, nay even though not quite all the scientific dis- coveries, from the circulation of the blood to the Roentgen rays and wireless telegraphy, have been made in America, we can have yet nothing but pride for the learning, the skill, the success, and the firm and resistless forward tread of those who grace the learned professions in America. But if our professions are to advance, nay if they are to continue what they are, depend upon it that an increasing technical standard, a course of greater length, more laboratories and minuter specialization cannot alone accomplish it. More important than all these things, more important than specific qualifications, are the temper of mind, the outlook of the student entering upon professional studies, and the attitude which he takes toward his chosen career. This attitude is the product of school and college life, and is acquired by subtle influences which build up character or undermine it. If the golden calf of utility is worshiped in the class-room 13 as well as in the streets, and perhaps even in the family, the student's attitude will become that of the alert and active devotee of that philosophy whose mandate is, "Succeed !" Such a man may reach in later life a certain worldly success, but he will remain in all essentials a professional quack and an influence working, according to his power, more or less for evil. If, on the other hand, the liberalizing power of the humanities, be their content what it may, has been exerted to the full upon him, the young professional student will appreciate his responsibilities as well as his capabilities, and holding both as a sacred trust, live a power among his fellow-men working for good. Our concern is first with the man. The man once made, all else will follow. We are sometimes told that the moral tone of the uni- versity is lower than that of the outside world, that the mingled restraints and freedom of college life, nay, even the pursuit of learning itself, make not for righteousness, nor probity, nor ideal conduct. The logic of such doctrine as this is the abolition of learning. Far better were it that these walls should stand for all time a blackened ruin than that they should foster the school of iniquity and degradation which such a notion infers. That young men, a large part of whose daily life consists in the honest fulfillment of the allotted task, that men habitually in contact with refined, dis- ciplined, and trained minds, in touch with the best that is known and thought and filled with the ideals which the wisest who have lived before them have held up to the admiration of the world, should live by moral standards lower than those of the street, the mart of trade, or the polls, is an error gross and palpable. And yet it is not altogether inconceivable that were the humanities stricken from the curriculum of our colleges and learning cultivated solely for the worldly advancement and prosperity to be gained by it ; were this beloved university of ours — which Heaven forbid — to degenerate so far as to train mere politicians, mere quacks, and mere pettifoggers, such imaginings as these might not seem to us so wholly grotesque. Religion has no 14 such aid and abettor as the disinterested pursuit of learning. Morahty has no closer ally than a liberal education. With- out education religion shrinks back into primitive supersti- tion. Without education morality fades like a dying ember blown into momentary glow by brute terror of the law. I confess that I view with deep concern the increasingly practical bias which is given to our everyday education, and the invasion of the college and even of the secondary school by subjects into which an alleged or actual utility enters to the detriment of their liberalizing power. I confess that I view with mistrust the enormous emphasis which we attach to facts statistically juggled; the undue weight which we give to speculative theories untested by competent knowl- edge of past speculative thought; as I view with alarm the minuter specialization of subject matter in college and uni- versity, when intrusted, as it sometimes is, to men to whom the humanities in any sense are a dim recollection of the sec- ondary school. It is for you, my younger brothers of Phi Beta Kappa, to recognize some of these things, and recog- nizing their nature, to stand firm for that openness of spirit, that quality of disinterestedness, that elevation of thought, and that unquenchable faith in high ideals which is the most precious outcome of your sojourn with the humanities. I respect the ingenious application of scientific principles to matter that trains our engineers, our chemists, and our physicists to mechanical skill and technical precision. I admire the nice complexities of applied science, and pro- cedure perfected by experience and precedent, which we call, respectively, the professions of medicine and of law, and which train competent guardians of our property, our rights, and our lives. I honor the patient and indefatigable spirit of research that wins for men, inch by inch, new lands in the territory of the unknown. And I bow before that abnega- tion of self that lives for the spiritual welfare of men and ofifers with brotherly hand the consolation and the stay which religion alone can give. But I do maintain withal that it is in the untechnical studies, the unprofessional studies, be 15 their content, let me say once more, what it may ; it is in those studies alone which are pursued without the possibiHty of transmutation into terms of practical utility that we can hope to find the elements which draw forth the undeveloped man within, which set forth lofty and unselfish ideals, and which, in a word, do really educate, elevate, and humanize. When James Russell Lowell defined a university as a place in which nothing useful was taught, he uttered no mere idle paradox. I am afraid that we are doing a great deal of use- ful work in this university, work which has its place here, but work which should not be permitted to usurp all places. The greatest need in the education of to-day, a need greater than short cuts to the professions, training for city councils or state legislatures, preliminary courses to speculative phi- lanthropy or air-ship building, is the restoration of the humanities to our college courses in a larger proportion than has been theirs for many a day. Where the line is to be drawn which shall divide the training of the man from the training of the engineer, the lawyer, or the physician is a matter comparatively unimportant. That such a line should be drawn is an imperative need of the moment, a need which temporizing can only make more clamorous in its just demand. Among the humanities that are with us or are to come, let us welcome every subject that can enlarge the horizon of the student and give him truer, saner, and more liberal views of man and life. It is not the topic which determines these qualities, but the spirit in which the subject is pursued, a spirit which demands a rigorous exclusion from its purview of all that is narrow and material. In a frank recognition of the liberalizing influences of the study of science and of the close relations of modern languages, history, and philo- sophical speculation to the development of the contempo- rary man, I cannot but affirm it as my conviction that the languages of the ancients, their art, literature, philosophy, and archaeology, will long continue the most fruitful of the humanities, not only because of their valuable content and 16 their incomparable position as to all that has come after, but because of their splendid isolation from the possibility of measurement and appraisement by utilitarian standards. Depend upon it that the sword is best whetted on that which it is destined never to cut. Depend upon it that the true glory of the humanities, whether gone, present, or to come, — like the glory of art, of literature, and the glory of rehgion itself, — is the immeasurability of all these priceless things by material standards, their spiritual worth, significance, and potency. AD ASTRA: AN ODE. Once more the gentle bonds of fellowship Draw hearts to closer union and inspire Our lives to service and our lips to song; Once more the lyre Leans patient to the fingers as they slip Idly amid the unawaken'd throng Of melodies instinct of living fire, Symmetric, strong, And seeking utterance of divine desire. Foregathered at the shrine of that Fair One — Child of a stately mother — here we bring Love and the joy of life and gratitude — Elated, sing Of Alma Mater's venerable years Enfolded in serene beatitude, And of the beauty of her daughter's face Bearing Athena's bays upon her brow ; Here, eager to endow Dull speech with music, chant in unison The hymn which adoration sanctifies, Greeting the mother's calm perennial grace, Greeting the daughter's maiden smiles and tears. Unknowing where the deeper rapture lies — To touch with reverent hand the wintered hair, Or kiss the shadows 'neath those April eyes. Thus as we stand Upon the upland, and our foreheads bare To the new morning's breath Waking to verdure all the nourishing land, Far through the unneighbored spaces of the air We seem to see. Prophetically, the defeat of death, And hear the cry of immortality ! (17) 18 11. Down the hushed aisles of sleep, Dimly perceived by that deep spiritual vision Wherethrough alone the ultimate truth is known, Troop mystic figures from the fields Elysian — A choric throng whose sandalled footfalls keep Time to the rhythm of being, and we are shown The pathway leading upward to the stars. For though amid the seething and the strife And all the clash and clangor of the marts We gird our loins for action, yet our life Lies like an island in a sea of dreams, And only that is real which imparts Profoundest sense of unreality. The thing which seems Is not the thing which is, and haply bars A beatific sight from eyes that fain would see. Is it some whisper from the infinite shore That fires as with a faculty sublime? Is it the echo of the distant roar Of questioning waves upon the marge of Time? We do but know that immortality Thrills the responsive lute-strings of the soul, And feeling upward through the dark to find Solution of impending mystery. We lift adoring eyes, that once were blind. As sudden from the clouds which backward roll A vast apocalypse illumines the mind. And we are free! If through eternity we are to be. Shall we not grasp the fullness of the whole. Completing the fair circle ? Not with death Shall come destruction ; wherefore then with birth 19 Cometh creation? Nay, the vital breath, KindHng to music these dull lips of earth. Breaks to the bud and blossom of a song. And in exultant measure loud and long Chants the majestic everlasting Now, Lifts to the stars this seeming-mortal clod. Prints on man's pale and melancholy brow The seal and superscription of a god ! III. Once more the unrelenting cycle cleaves The little orbit of our lives, and we. Half ready to be gone, reluctantly Scan Time's worn volume, turning slow the leaves Which hold the record of the garnered sheaves, The fruitage of men's actions. Not in vain Is any deed wrought out to perfectness. Nor any pain Endured in silence and with fortitude. Nor any thought evolved amid the stress And onward rush of an unpausing flight. The men who snatch the lightning from the sky To turn the wheels of trade, the men who bear Fate's bitter chastisements, the men who brood Beneath the brooding forehead of the night, — Alike do share In that result which makes for righteousness, — That last effect which is felicity. For though existence be but ebb and flow, A dower divine dwells in that ocean vast, Each tide that laves the beach doth higher go, All aspiration leads to heaven at last. And through the pulse and passion of our lives, Which mock the narrower wisdom of the schools, 20 We feel the large vibration of the spheres ; And in humanity's deep-throbbing heart Our chastened ears List to the promise of a nobler art Too fine to feel the chains of iron rules, — Too great to wear the gyves Of gray tradition grown most tyrannous ! He only fears The spectre of the ages who hath lost The ages' mightiest bequest to us, — Belief in selfhood, knowledge of the cost Of keeping souls of men and peoples free. IV. And thou, fair Land, forever grown more dear. Forever blessing more abundantly. How shall we fitting homage render thee Or bring our gifts more near? Down the perspective of the greatening year We seem to see thee struggling to the light, — We seem to hear, As 'twere amid still voices of the night. Thy clarion call outringing cold and clear : "Onward and upward ! there are foes to fight ; Upward and onward ! there is God to fear." And whether regal in thy martial guise Or weeping at thy stricken chieftain's bier, The sunlight ever dwelling in thine eyes Fashions Hope's rainbow in thine every tear. Protagonist in Freedom's holy cause! Teach us the lessons of thy great emprise ; Bring swift release From all the bigotries and hates of war ; Thy healing bring 21 To hurt hearts hungering for thy ministries ; Give ear and answer to our questioning, And to our spirits peace. Yet evermore Graft in our bosoms that grim patriot faith That will not falter at a task begun Though all a world in arms should bid us pause, — Though foes at home should bid us leave undone The work evolved through everlasting laws, And seek to terrify us with the wraith Of murdered precedent. Beneath the sun There is no power to mangle or to mar The outcome of stern destiny's decree, No power beneath the sun to filch one star From that bright flag which stands for liberty! V. Patient and pauseless be the onward urge Of men grown conscious of divinity; Up to the summits ! mindless of the scourge Which ever threatens him who would be free. Revere Convention, but be not her slave ; Bow to the past, but bid the future hail ; Keep green the grasses on each hallowed grave, But dare the lightnings, so the truth prevail ! Listen at Nature's lips, Her secret learn. Nor ever, grown imperious, come to spurn The offer of her myriad comradeships ; She ever hath Some new delight for each life's brightening, Some goal to which each spirit may aspire, Some love to give for sweet love's heightening,- An aftermath Of joy for each desire. 22 The reticent night holds all her gifts of stars For him who breathes her amplitudes of air, And on her breast the lily moon doth wear Like a celestial flower. No canker mars Where only beauty dwells eternally And even sadness blooms into a joy; So he who seeks the gold in earth's alloy Oft finds the germ of right in seeming wrong, — Loves best the music in life's minor key, — Turns fromi the cadences of Helen's song To list the sighs of sad Andromache. Thus striving, thus believing, we attain The empyrean, and the human cry Swells to a song divine, and man's domain Circles the lucent glory of the sky. y , .,^ ^ , ^ i"^ .^,