not your hosts for base.  O thrice must one be you, to see them shift Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift; With faith, that of privations and spilt blood, Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!  And thrice must one be you, to wait release From duress in the swamp of their increase.  At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest, A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed Philosophers behold; desponding view Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few; Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins, Dive down the fumy AEtna of their brains.  Belated vessels on a rising sea, They seem:  they pass!

     — But not Philosophy!

— Ay, be we faithful to ourselves:  despise Nought but the coward in us!  That way lies The wisdom making passage through our slough.  Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow; Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.  Philosophy is Life’s one match for Fate.  That photosphere of our high fountain One, Our spirit’s Lord and Reason’s fostering sun, Philosophy, shall light us in the shade, Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.  Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed, Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!  Advantage to the Many:  that we name God’s voice; have there the surety in our aim.  This thought unto my sister do I owe, And irony and satire off me throw.  They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds, Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.  Now let the perils thicken:  clearer seen, Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.  Who never yet of scattered lamps was born To speed a world, a marching world to warn, But sunward from the vivid Many springs, Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.

     The warning

     We have seen mighty men ballooning high,
     And in another moment bump the ground. 
     He falls; and in his measurement is found
     To count some inches o’er the common fry. 
     ’Twas not enough to send him climbing sky,
     Yet ’twas enough above his fellows crowned,
     Had he less panted.  Let his faithful hound
     Bark at detractors.  He may walk or lie. 
     Concerns it most ourselves, who with our gas —
     This little Isle’s insatiable greed
     For Continents—­filled to inflation burst. 
     So do ripe nations into squalor pass,
     When, driven as herds by their old private thirst,
     They scorn the brain’s wild search for virtuous light.

     Outside the crowd

     To sit on History in an easy chair,
     Still rivalling the wild hordes by whom ’twas writ! 
     Sure, this beseems a race of laggard wit,
     Unwarned by those plain letters scrawled on air. 
     If more than hands’ and armsful be our share,
     Snatch we for substance we see vapours flit. 
     Have we not heard derision infinite
     When old men play the youth to chase the snare? 
     Let us be belted athletes,