Out of the mercury shimmer of glass
Over these daguerreotypes
The balloon-like spread of a skirt of silk emerges
With its little figure of flowers.
And the enameled glair of parted hair
Lies over the oval brow,
From under which eyes of fiery blackness
Look through you.
And the only repose of spirit shown
Is in the hands
Lying loosely one in the other,
Lightly clasped somewhat below the breast. ...
And in the companion folder of this case
Of gutta percha
Is the shape of a man.
His brow is oval too, but broader.
His nose is long, but thick at the tip.
His eyes are blue
Wherein faith burns her signal lights,
And flashes her convictions.
His mouth is tense, almost a slit.
And his face is a massive Calvinism
Resting on a stock tie.

They were married, you see.
The clasp on this gutta percha case
Locks them together.
They were locked together in life.
And a hasp of brass
Keeps their shadows face to face in the case
Which has been handed down—
(The pictures of noble ancestors,
Showing what strains of gentle blood
Flow in the third generation)—
From Massachusetts to Illinois. ...

Long ago it was over for them,
Massachusetts has done its part,
She raised the seed
And a wind blew it over to Illinois
Where it has mixed, multiplied, mutated
Until one soul comes forth:
But a soul all striped and streaked,
And a soul self-crossed and self-opposed,
As it were a tree which on one branch
Bears northern spies,
And on another thorn apples. ...

Come Weissmann, Von Baer and Schleiden,
And you Buffon and De Vries,
Come with your secrets of sea shore asters
Night-shade, henbanes, gloxinias,
Veronicas, snap-dragons, Danebrog,
And show us how they cross and change,
And become hybrids.
And show us what heredity is,
And how it works.
For the secret of these human beings
Locked in this gutta percha case
Is the secret of Mephistos and red Campions.

Let us lay out the facts as far as we can.
Her eyes were black,
His eyes were blue.
She saw through shadows, walls and doors,
She knew life and hungered for more.
But he lived in the mists, and climbed to high places
To feel clouds about his face, and get the lights
Of supernal sun-sets.
She was reason, and he was faith.
She had an illumination, but of the intellect.
And he had an illumination but of the soul.
And she saw God as merciless law,
And he knew God as divine love.
And she was a man, and he in part was a woman.
He stood in a pulpit and preached the Christ,
And the remission of sins by blood,
And the literal fall of man through Adam,
And the mystical and actual salvation of man
Through the coming of Christ.

And she sat in a pew shading her great eyes
To hide her scorn for it all.
She was crucified,
And raged to the last like the impenitent thief
Against the fate which wasted and trampled down
Her wisdom, sagacity, versatile skill,
Which would have piled up gold or honors
For a mate who knew that life is growth,
And health, and the satisfaction of wants,
And place and reputation and mansion houses,
And mahogany and silver,
And beautiful living.
She hated him, and hence she pitied him.
She was like the gardener with great pruners
Deciding to clip, sometimes not clipping
Just for the dread.
She had married him—but why?
Some inscrutable air
Wafted his pollen to her across a wide garden—
Some power had crossed them.
And here is the secret I think:
(As we would say here is electricity)
It is the vibration inhering in sex
That produces devils or angels,
And it is the sex reaction in men and women
That brings forth devils or angels,
And starts in them the germs of powers or passions,
Becoming loves, ferocities, gifts and weaknesses,
Till the stock dies out.
So now for their hybrid children:—
She gave birth to four daughters and one son.

But first what have we for the composition of these daughters?
Reason opposed and becoming keener therefor.
Faith mocked and drawing its mantel closer.
Love thwarted and becoming acid.
Hatred mounting too high and thinning into pity.
Hunger for life unappeased and becoming a stream under-ground
Where only blind things swim.
God year by year removing himself to remoter thrones
Of inexorable law.
God coming closer even while disease
And total blindness came between him and God
And defeated the mercy of God.
And a love and a trust growing deeper in him
As she in great thirst, hanging on the cross,
Mocked his crucifixion,
And talked philosophy between the spasms of pain,
Till at last she is all satirist,
And he is all saint.

And all the children were raised
After the strictest fashion in New England,
And made to join the church,
And attend its services.
And these were the children:

Janet was a religious fanatic and a virago,
She debated religion with her husband for ten years,
Then he refused to talk, and for twenty years
Scarcely spoke to her.
She died a convert to Catholicism.
They had two children:
The boy became a forgerer
Of notorious skill.
The daughter married, but was barren.

Miranda married a rich man
And spent his money so fast that he failed.
She lashed him with a scorpion tongue
And made him believe at last
With her incessant reasonings
That he was a fool, and so had failed.
In middle life he started over again,
But became tangled in a law-suit.
Because of these things he killed himself.

Louise was a nymphomaniac.
She was married twice.
Both husbands fled from her insatiable embraces.
At thirty-two she became a woman on a telephone list,
Subject to be called,
And for two years ran through a daily orgy of sex,
When blindness came on her, as it came on her father before her,
And she became a Christian Scientist,
And led an exemplary life.

Deborah was a Puritan of Puritans,
Her list of unmentionable things
Tabooed all the secrets of creation,
Leaving politics, religion, and human faults,
And the mistakes most people make,
And the natural depravity of man,
And his freedom to redeem himself if he chooses,
As the only subjects of conversation.
As a twister of words and meanings,
And a skilled welder of fallacies,
And a swift emerger from ineluctable traps of logic,
And a wit with an adder's tongue,
And a laugher,
And an unafraid facer of enemies,
Oppositions, hatreds,
She never knew her equal.
She was at once very cruel, and very tender,
Very selfish and very generous
Very little and very magnanimous.
Scrupulous as to the truth, and utterly disregardless of the truth.

Of the keenest intuitions, yet gullible,
Easily used at times, of erratic judgment,
Analytic but pursuing with incredible swiftness
The falsest trails to her own undoing—
All in all the strangest mixture of colors and scent
Derived from father and mother,
But mixed by whom, and how, and why?

Now for the son named Herman, rebel soul.
His brow was like a loaf of bread, his eyes
Turned from his father's blue to gray, his nose
Was like his mother's, skin was dark like hers.
His shapely body, hands and feet belonged
To some patrician face, not to Marat's.
And his was like Marat's, fanatical,
Materialistic, fierce, as it might guide
A reptile's crawl, but yet he crawled to peaks
Loving the hues of mists, but not the mists
His father loved. And being a rebel soul
He thought the world all wrong. A nothingness
Moving as malice marred the life of man.
'Twas man's great work to fight this Giant Fraud,
And all who praise and serve Him. 'Tis for man
To free the world from error, suffer, die
For liberty of thought. You see his mother
Is in possession of one part of him,
Or all of him for some time.

So he lives
Nursing the dream (like father he's a dreamer)
That genius fires him. All the while a gift
For analytics stored behind that brow,
That bulges like a loaf of bread, is all
Of which he well may boast above the man
He hates as but a slave of faith and fear.
He feeds luxurious doubt with Omar Khyam,
But for long years neglects the jug of wi

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