  II saw the Muses, in august assize, Standing before the Planetary Norns, Their faces lit with calm, victorious eyes, Weird as the beauty shed on starry morns. I heard a voice cry from the Judgment Seat: “Declare unto the Rulers of the Spheres The story of the triumph and defeat, The story of The Mighty Hundred Years.” And then the Muses, bearing in their hands High sibylline scrolls, sang to the Sceptered Powers: “The sun ascends in man, the sky expands; Into the Comrade-Future climb the Hours. Walled by the whirlwind, dark with agÈd wrong; Then came the bright steps of the Lyric Seven, And heights and depths grew resonant with song. “Above the dead the circling music sprang— Dead custom, dead religion, dead desire; Down the keen wind of dawn the rapture rang, White with new dream and shot with Shelley’s fire. “Out of the whirlwind Truth that came on France, Rose the young Titaness, Democracy, Superb in gesture, with the godlike glance; Now stirred, now still with dream of things to be. Strong mother of men, molded of lion race; And all men’s hearts were shaken by her power, The strange, disturbing beauty of her face. “New seeing came upon the eyes of men, New life ran pulsing in the veins of Earth: It was a sifting of the souls again, The weighing of the ages and their worth. II“Man burst the chains that his own hands had made; Hurled down the blind, fierce gods that in blind years He fashioned, and a power upon them laid To bruise his heart and shake his soul with fears. Careless of hoary precedent and pact; And sworn to know the truth of things at last, Knelt at the altar of the Naked Fact. “One mighty gleam, and old horizons broke! All the vast, glimmering outline of the Whole Swam on the vision, shifting, at one stroke, The ancient gravitation of the soul. “All things came circling in one cosmic dance, One motion older than the ages are; Swung by one Law, one Purpose, one Advance, Serene and steadfast as the morning star. “And now men trace the orbits of the Law, And find it is their shelter and their friend; For there, behind its mystery and awe, God’s sure hand presses to a blessÈd end. Up through the storm of stars, skies upon skies; And down through circling atoms, nearing fast The brink of things, beyond which Chaos lies. “Yea, in the shaping of a grain of sand, He sees the law that made the spheres to be— Sees atom-worlds spun by the Hidden Hand, To whirl about their small Alcyone. “With spell of wizard Science on his eyes, And augment on his arm, he probes through space; Or pushes back the low, unfriendly skies, To feel the wind of Saturn on his face. “He walks abroad upon the Zodiac, To weigh the worlds in balances, to fuse Suns in his crucible, and carry back The spheral music and the cosmic news. III“And now the Powers of Water, Fire, and Air, And that dread Thing behind the lightning’s light Cry, Master us, O man, for thou art fair; To serve thee is our freedom and our might. “We love the craft that found our hidden place— The beauty of the cunning of thy hands; We love the quiet empire of thy face: Hook us with steel and harness us with bands! “Make us the Genius of the crookÈd plow; The Spirit in the whisper of the wheels; The unseen Presence sitting at the prow, To urge the wanderings huge, sea-cleaving keels. He lays bright harness on them, and his word; New pulse from continent to continent Runs; the dead places of the world are stirred. “Bearing the sceptres of the mystery, Man rides at elbow with the flying gale, Shrinks up the ancient spaces: land and sea Dispute his wingÈd way without avail— “All but the Arctic silences, where stands The Spirit of the Winters, and denies, With incontestable gesture of white hands, And lure of baleful beauty in her eyes. “It is the hour of man: new Purposes, Broad-shouldered, press against the world’s slow gate; And voices from the vast eternities Still preach the soul’s austere apostolate. The press of endless passion: every goal A traveler’s tavern, whence he must depart On new divine adventures of the soul.”
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