Time was when power of sentiment
Fired Europe with a frenzied zeal;
The stars out of their courses went
For what the Christian heart did feel.
Then babes with mail-ed knights did vie
To rescue from the Infidel
The place where once their Lord did lie,
A rended shroud, an empty shell.
Fanatics were they, minds distraught;
And yet meseems did body there
Some energy of noble thought,
Some prescience of a holy care
Of man for man, to be fulfilled
As man grows more and symbol less,
And sympathy no more is killed
By creed’s intolerable duress—
By the duress of creed and greed
And race and rank and worn-out codes.
Awake, O Man, and find thee freed!
Stand up from under thy brute loads!
Be thou thyself and claim descent
From the eternal Great and True!
Were but some dawning glimmer lent
Thy mind of what thou art and who,
Thy spirit with amaze should sink
And sit astonied one whole day,
Then from the vision new life drink,
And, casting its dead past away,
Rise in a glowing golden youth
To share the omnipotence of love,
The immortality of truth!
The quick ideal thy choice should move,
And not the fossiled precedent;
Reason set free should free the heart,
And with thy being’s full consent,
Thy powers no longer vainly spent,
Shouldst thou fulfill thy natal part!