Winds up the springs of instinct which uncoil,
     Each in its season; ties me to my home,
     My race, my time, my nation, and my creed
     So closely that if I but slip my wrist
     Out of the band that cuts it to the bone,
     Men say, “He hath a devil”; he has lent
     All that I hold in trust, as unto one
     By reason of his weakness and his years
     Not fit to hold the smallest shred in fee
     Of those most common things he calls his own
     And yet—­my Rabbi tells me—­he has left
     The care of that to which a million worlds. 
     Filled with unconscious life were less than naught,
     Has left that mighty universe, the Soul,
     To the weak guidance of our baby hands,
     Turned us adrift with our immortal charge,
     Let the foul fiends have access at their will,
     Taking the shape of angels, to our hearts,
     Our hearts already poisoned through and through
     With the fierce virus of ancestral sin. 
     If what my Rabbi tells me is the truth,
     Why did the choir of angels sing for joy? 
     Heaven must be compassed in a narrow space,
     And offer more than room enough for all
     That pass its portals; but the underworld,
     The godless realm, the place where demons forge
     Their fiery darts and adamantine chains,
     Must swarm with ghosts that for a little while
     Had worn the garb of flesh, and being heirs
     Of all the dulness of their stolid sires,
     And all the erring instincts of their tribe,
     Nature’s own teaching, rudiments of “sin,”
     Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail
     To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay
     And cursed with sense enough to lose their souls!

     Brother, thy heart is troubled at my word;
     Sister, I see the cloud is on thy brow. 
     He will not blame me, He who sends not peace,
     But sends a sword, and bids us strike amain
     At Error’s gilded crest, where in the van
     Of earth’s great army, mingling with the best
     And bravest of its leaders, shouting loud
     The battle-cries that yesterday have led
     The host of Truth to victory, but to-day
     Are watchwords of the laggard and the slave,
     He leads his dazzled cohorts.  God has made
     This world a strife of atoms and of spheres;
     With every breath I sigh myself away
     And take my tribute from the wandering wind
     To fan the flame of life’s consuming fire;
     So, while my thought has life, it needs must burn,
     And burning, set the stubble-fields ablaze,
     Where all the harvest long ago was reaped
     And safely garnered in the ancient barns,
     But still the gleaners, groping for their food,
     Go blindly feeling through the close-shorn straw,
     While the young reapers flash their glittering steel
     Where later suns have ripened nobler grain!