But is he rightly manful in her eyes,
     A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,
     A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,
     Desireing and desireable he shines;
     As peaches, that have caught the sun’s uprise
     And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines. 
     Earth fills him with her juices, without fear
     That she will cast him drunken down the steeps. 
     All woman is she to this man most dear;
     He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps: 
     She conscient, she sensitive, in him;
     With him enwound, his brave ambition hers: 
     By him humaner made; by his keen spurs
     Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb,
     Her crazy adoration of big thews,
     Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,
     Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world
     In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.

     This man, this hero, works not to destroy;
     This godlike—­as the rock in ocean stands; —
     He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands
     Creative; in his edifice has joy. 
     How strength may serve for purity is shown
     When he himself can scourge to make it clean. 
     Withal his pitch of pride would not disown
     A sober world that walks the balanced mean
     Between its tempters, rarely overthrown: 
     And such at times his army’s march has been.

     Near is he to great Nature in the thought
     Each changing Season intimately saith,
     That nought save apparition knows the death;
     To the God-lighted mind of man ’tis nought. 
     She counts not loss a word of any weight;
     It may befal his passions and his greeds
     To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,
     But life gone breathless will she reinstate.

     Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,
     When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,
     Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,
     Strike camp, and onward, like the wind’s cloud-fleets. 
     Unresting she, unresting he, from change
     To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;
     She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,
     Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.

     No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,
     She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;
     But he, the flower at head and soil at root,
     Is miracle, guides he the brute to God. 
     And that way seems he bound; that way the road,
     With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,
     Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,
     He travels, urged by some internal goad.

     Dares he behold the thing he is, what thing
     He would become is in his mind its child;
     Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;
     For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled. 
     So moves he forth in