228 BIEDS 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 aesthetic 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, im- 

 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 



