Under the low-browed tempest’s eye of ire,
     That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,
     Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwart
     All ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;
     A stranger still, religiously divined;
     Not yet with understanding read aright. 
     But when the mind, the cherishable mind,
     The multitude’s grave shepherd, took full flight,
     Himself as mirror raised among his kind,
     He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight: 
     Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,
     His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,
     Had come of many a grip in mastery,
     Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,
     And of his bosom made him lord, to keep
     The starry roof of his unruffled frame
     Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep
     Below, above, aye with a wistful aim.

     The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown,
     By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;
     Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,
     The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown. 
     To whom unwittingly did he aspire
     In wilderness, where bitter was his need: 
     To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed
     For light and air, he struck through crimson mire. 
     But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,
     And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,
     All choral in its fruitful garden camp,
     The spiritual the palpable illumed.

     This gift of penetration and embrace,
     His prize from tidal battles lost or won,
     Reveals the scheme to animate his race: 
     How that it is a warfare but begun;
     Unending; with no Power to interpose;
     No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,
     Heard of the Highest; never battle’s close,
     The victory complete and victor crowned: 
     Nor solace in defeat, save from that sense
     Of strength well spent, which is the strength renewed. 
     In manhood must he find his competence;
     In his clear mind the spiritual food: 
     God being there while he his fight maintains;
     Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,
     While he rejects the suicide despair;
     Accepts the spur of explicable pains;
     Obedient to Nature, not her slave: 
     Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;
     Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,
     And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:-
     Whence Evil in a world unread before;
     That mystery to simple springs resolved. 
     His God the Known, diviner to adore,
     Shows Nature’s savage riddles kindly solved. 
     Inconscient, insensitive, she reigns
     In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face. 
     Back to the primal brute shall he retrace
     His path, doth he permit to force her chains
     A soft Persuader coursing through his veins,
     An icy Huntress stringing to the chase: 
     What one the flash disdains;
     What one so gives it grace.