CHAPTER XXI 

 MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE 



A sacred kinship I would not forego 



Binds me to all that breathes: through endless strife 



The calm and deathless dignity of life 



Unites each bleeding victim to its foe. 



I am the child of earth and air and sea. 



My lullaby by hoarse Silurian storms 



Was chanted, and through endless changing forms 



Of tree and bird and beast unceasingly 



The toiling ages wrought to fashion me. 



Lo! these large ancestors have left a breath 

 Of their great souls in mine, defying death 

 And change. I grow and blossom as the tree, 

 And ever feel deep-delving earthy roots 

 Binding me daily to the common clay: 

 Yet with its airy impulse upward shoots 

 My soul into the realms of light and day. 

 And thou, O sea, stern mother of my soul, 

 Thy tempests ring in me, thy billows roll! 



HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN. 



Man betrays his relation to what is below him, thick-skulled, 

 small-brained, fishy, quadrumanous quadruped, ill-disguised, hardly 

 escaped into biped, and has paid for the new powers by the loss of some 

 of the old ones. But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, 

 maker of planets and suns, is in him. On the one side elemental order, 

 sandstone and granite, rock ledges, peat bog, forest, sea, and shore. 

 On the other part, thought and the spirit which composes and decom- 



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