228 BIRDS AND POETS 
Hindus, with hymn and apothegm and endless epic; 
Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in flames of 
lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive 
songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies and 
enslavement; Christ, with bent head, brooding love 
and peace, like a dove; Greek, creating eternal 
shapes of physical and esthetic proportion; Roman, 
lord of satire, the sword, and the codex, —of the 
figures, some far off and veiled, others near and visi- 
ble; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing but 
fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo, and 
the great painters, architects, musicians; rich Shake- 
speare, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of 
Feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous col- 
ors, owner thereof, and using them at will; —and 
so to such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, 
though near us, leaping over the ages, sit again, 1m- 
passive, imperturbable, like the Egyptian gods. Of 
these, and the like of these, is it too much, indeed, 
to return to our favorite figure, and view them as 
orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces of that 
other heaven, the cosmic intellect, the Soul? 
“Ye powerful and resplendent ones! ye were, in 
your atmospheres, grown not for America, but rather 
for her foes, the Feudal and the old— while our 
genius is democratic and modern. Yet could ye, 
indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New 
World’s nostrils—not to enslave us as now, but, 
for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own — per- 
haps (dare we to say it?) to dominate, even destroy 
what you yourselves have left! On your plane, and 
