Nay, my grandsire, though you leave me latest lord of Locksley Hall,

Speak of Amy’s heavenly graces and the frailty of her fall,

Point me to the shield of Locksley, hanging in this mansion lone,

I must turn from such sad splendor ere my heart be changed to stone.

While you prate of pride ancestral and the dead dreams of your youth,

I, despite my birth and lineage, am a battler for the truth.

To the work-worn, half-starved peasants of this realm my heart goes out—

Those who, plundered and forgotten, find this life a ruthless rout.

In the rustling robes of Amy bloomed the roses that had fled

From the cheeks of pauper maidens forced into the brothel-bed;

In her saintly smiles and glances flashed the sunlight that was shut

By the iron-hand injustice from the cotter’s humble hut.

Nay, ‘tis wrong that we should range with science glorying in the time,

While we force our brother mortals into squalor, need, and crime;

Wicked we should pose as Christians singing songs to God on high,

Heedless of his tortured creatures who in pauper prisons lie.

Christless is the crime of turning creed-stopped ears to teardrops shed

By the women whom oppression robs of virtue for their bread.

Satan’s blush would mantle crimson could he see the stunted child

Slaving in our marts and markets, helpless, hopeless, and reviled—

See its pallid face uplifted from the whirling factory wheels,

Tear-stained with the grief and anguish of a baby brain that reels,

Tortured in life’s budding springtime, toiling on with stifled cries,

Seeing, through its tears refracted, rippling cascades, azure skies;

Skies and birds and flowery meadows made for children wealthy-born,

While God’s outcasts, with their parents, robbed and drudging, live forlorn,

Men in whom the fires of hope have sunk into a sordid spark,

Mothers rearing helpless infants for the brothel’s dawnless dark.

While this world seems far too crowded to provide us work for all,

Acres spread their untilled bosoms, while the nations rise and fall.

Nature’s storehouse, made for all men, is monopolized by some,

Robbing labor of its produce, making almshouse, jail, and slum.

Side by side with art and progress creeps the haggard spectre, Want—

Creeps the frightful phantom, Hunger, with its bloodless body gaunt.

Wider, wider spreads the chasm ‘twixt the wealthy and the poor,

Social discontent declaring that such wrongs cannot endure.

And this yawning of the chasm is the curse of every race,

As it saps and kills its manhood ere it reach the zenith-place;

Spartan valor, Grecian learning, Roman honor had their day,

But land plunder rose among them, dooming death by slow decay.

Shall we wait for evolution, let it right these monstrous wrongs,

While the helpless, young, and tender writhe and groan ‘neath social thongs?

Nay, ‘tis better all should perish in a battle for the right,

Than let philosophic cowards keep us in this stygian night.

Locksley Hall has now a master who would claim the earth for all,

Who would make the titled idler cease to rob his tenant-thrall;

Wreck the Church and State if need be (better such in time will rise),

But who from this glorious purpose nevermore will turn his eyes—

Never, till the arms of nature clasp in joy her outcast child,

Long since driven from the meadow and the dell and woodland wild,

Till to each belongs the produce of his hand and heart and brain,

And glad heralds of millennium thrill along our path of pain.

Though the world has piled its fagots round the great and good and brave;

Thrust its Socrates the hemlock, scourged its Jesus to the grave;

Though its sneer has chilled the tender, and its frown has cursed the good,

While its Nero sways the sceptre and its Emmett dies in blood;

Yet in Truth there is a power that through ceaseless cycles slow

Will inscribe the doom of Error in an ever-fadeless glow,

That will trample on oppression, burst the chains and crush the throne,

Rearing on the blood and ruin justice-reign from zone to zone.

Idealistic dreamer, say you? In your youth you once felt so?

Well, I only pray life’s sunset, bowing down my head with snow,

Shall not swerve me from my purpose, though the victor-laurels twine

In my reach, and if forsaking my convictions they are mine.

Do not so condemn the realists, rhymesters, authors, and their way,

Just because they point about us to the errors of to-day;

Spare them, though they gaze not upward from our self-wrought piteous plight,

For, though blinded and despairing, they are struggling toward the light.

Let the realist dip his falcon in the boiling blood of life,

Tracing in heartrending horror all the hoary wrongs and strife,

Till the world shall sick and sadden of its folly and its sin,

Hearkening through the roar of traffic to the still small voice within—

Voice which murmurs Christ’s own message as we circle round the sun:

That, though greed and creed divide us, still humanity is one—

One in all its godlike longing, one in all its hopes and fears,

With its calvaries, scaffolds, hemlocks, and its seas of unshed tears.

Then this star of sorrow swinging through the vast immortal void

Shall, regenerated, slumber while man’s heart is overjoyed,

Thrilled with yearnings altruistic, triumphing o’er clods of clay,

As we march into the love-light of the grand Millennial day.