A TORCHBEARER

GREAT cities rise and have their fall; the brass

That held their glories moulders in its turn.

Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed,

And ever on the palimpsest of earth

Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ.

But one thing makes the years its pedestal,

Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps

A skyward wing above its epitaph —

The will of man willing immortal things.

The ages are but baubles hung upon

The thread of some strong lives — and one slight wrist

May lift a century above the dust;

For Time,

The Sisyphean load of little lives,

Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great.

But who are these that, linking hand in hand,

Transmit across the twilight waste of years

The flying brightness of a kindled hour?

Not always, nor alone, the lives that search

How they may snatch a glory out of heaven

Or add a height to Babel; oftener they

That in the still fulfilment of each day's

Pacific order hold great deeds in leash,

That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks

Hide the attempered blade of high emprise,

And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.

So greatly gave he, nurturing‘ gainst the call

Of one rare moment all the daily store

Of joy distilled from the acquitted task,

And that deliberate rashness which bespeaks

The pondered action passed into the blood;

So swift to harden purpose into deed

That, with the wind of ruin in his hair,

Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh,

And at one stroke he lived the whole of life,

Poured all in one libation to the truth,

A brimming flood whose drops shall overflow

On deserts of the soul long beaten down

By the brute hoof of habit, till they spring

In manifold upheaval to the sun.

Call here no high artificer to raise

His wordy monument — such lives as these

Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp

An empty vesture. Let resounding lives

Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaults

And make the grave their spokesman — such as he

Are as the hidden streams that, underground,

Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine,

Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars

The scent of freedom; or a light that burns

Immutably across the shaken seas,

Forevermore by nameless hands renewed,

Where else were darkness and a glutted shore.