RIGHTS

WHAT am I but the creature Thou hast made?

What have I save the blessings Thou hast lent?

What hope I but thy mercy and thy love?

Who but myself shall cloud my soul with fear?

Whose hand protect me from myself but thine?

I claim the rights of weakness, I, the babe,

Call on my sire to shield me from the ills

That still beset my path, not trying me

With snares beyond my wisdom or my strength,

He knowing I shall use them to my harm,

And find a tenfold misery in the sense

That in my childlike folly I have sprung

The trap upon myself as vermin use,

Drawn by the cunning bait to certain doom.

Who wrought the wondrous charm that leads us on

To sweet perdition, but the selfsame power

That set the fearful engine to destroy

His wretched offspring ( as the Rabbis tell ),

And hid its yawning jaws and treacherous springs

In such a show of innocent sweet flowers

It lured the sinless angels and they fell?

Ah! He who prayed the prayer of all mankind

Summed in those few brief words the mightiest plea

For erring souls before the courts of heaven,—

Save us from being tempted,— lest we fall!

If we are only as the potter's clay

Made to be fashioned as the artist wills,

And broken into shards if we offend

The eye of Him who made us, it is well;

Such love as the insensate lump of clay

That spins upon the swift-revolving wheel

Bears to the hand that shapes its growing form,—

Such love, no more, will be our hearts’ return

To the great Master-workman for his care,—

Or would be, save that this, our breathing clay,

Is intertwined with fine innumerous threads

That make it conscious in its framer's hand;

And this He must remember who has filled

These vessels with the deadly draught of life,—

Life, that means death to all it claims. Our love

Must kindle in the ray that streams from heaven,

A faint reflection of the light divine;

The sun must warm the earth before the rose

Can show her inmost heart-leaves to the sun.

He yields some fraction of the Maker's right

Who gives the quivering nerve its sense of pain;

Is there not something in the pleading eye

Of the poor brute that suffers, which arraigns

The law that bids it suffer? Has it not

A claim for some remembrance in the book

That fills its pages with the idle words

Spoken of men? Or is it only clay,

Bleeding and aching in the potter's hand,

Yet all his own to treat it as He will

And when He will to cast it at his feet,

Shattered, dishonored, lost forevermore?

My dog loves me, but could he look beyond

His earthly master, would his love extend

To Him who — Hush! I will not doubt that He

Is better than our fears, and will not wrong

The least, the meanest of created things!

He would not trust me with the smallest orb

That circles through the sky; He would not give

A meteor to my guidance; would not leave

The coloring of a cloudlet to my hand;

He locks my beating heart beneath its bars

And keeps the key himself; He measures out

The draughts of vital breath that warm my blood,

Winds up the springs of instinct which uncoil,

Each in its season; ties me to my home,

My race, my time, my nation, and my creed

So closely that if I but slip my wrist

Out of the band that cuts it to the bone,

Men say, “He hath a devil;” He has lent

All that I hold in trust, as unto one

By reason of his weakness and his years

Not fit to hold the smallest shred in fee

Of those most common things he calls his own,—

And yet — my Rabbi tells me — He has left

The care of that to which a million worlds

Filled with unconscious life were less than naught,

Has left that mighty universe, the Soul,

To the weak guidance of our baby hands,

Let the foul fiends have access at their will,

Taking the shape of angels, to our hearts,—

Our hearts already poisoned through and through

With the fierce virus of ancestral sin;

Turned us adrift with our immortal charge,

To wreck ourselves in gulfs of endless woe.

If what my Rabbi tells me is the truth

Why did the choir of angels sing for joy?

Heaven must be compassed in a narrow space,

And offer more than room enough for all

That pass its portals; but the under-world,

The godless realm, the place where demons forge

Their fiery darts and adamantine chains,

Must swarm with ghosts that for a little while

Had worn the garb of flesh, and being heirs

Of all the dulness of their stolid sires,

And all the erring instincts of their tribe,

Nature's own teaching, rudiments of “sin,”

Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail

To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay

And cursed with sense enough to lose their souls!

Brother, thy heart is troubled at my word;

Sister, I see the cloud is on thy brow.

He will not blame me, He who sends not peace,

But sends a sword, and bids us strike amain

At Error's gilded crest, where in the van

Of earth's great army, mingling with the best

And bravest of its leaders, shouting loud

The battle-cries that yesterday have led

The host of Truth to victory, but to-day

Are watchwords of the laggard and the slave,

He leads his dazzled cohorts. God has made

This world a strife of atoms and of spheres;

With every breath I sigh myself away

And take my tribute from the wandering wind

To fan the flame of life's consuming fire;

So, while my thought has life, it needs must burn,

And, burning, set the stubble-fields ablaze,

Where all the harvest long ago was reaped

And safely garnered in the ancient barns.

But still the gleaners, groping for their food,

Go blindly feeling through the close-shorn straw,

While the young reapers flash, their glittering steel

Where later suns have ripened nobler grain!