Birth of the Ideal

Far in the twilight of a barbarous morn, 
When man was beast, unarmed with fang or horn, 
Hiding in dens and hollows of the rock
With bears for elder brothers, and a flock
Of starved hyenas for house-vermin gaunt,
That gnawed the bones he split, or his, for want;
Even in that armless struggle for a place,
Against the weapons of each earlier race,
The faintest gleams of dawning soul began
In the one gift that marked that beast a Man.
All other brutes, fed, housed, and mated, went
To their untroubled sleep in full content:
He, with strict needs yet glaring on him this,
Sought beyond all for the superfluous,—
As Bumpkin, here, whose toes through rent shoes grin,
Scorns that, but suffers for a bosom-pin!

Soon as the savage in his houseless wild,—
(Dame Nature’s foundling rather than her child,)
Wrung scantiest substance from her churlish fist,
And frail defense more lavished on the beast,
Confronting many a death, that he might live,
With what rude arms the savage wilds can give,—
Each conquered want left larger discontent;
While clay asked bread, the soul sought ornament,—
For some gay tracery on his deer-skin mat,
Some plume for heads unsheltered by a hat;
And on those limbs, for which no loom had wrought, 
Drew forms to clothe his rude, barbaric thought.

Little the damsel gliding down Broadway,
Whose “darling hat” is just a spring boquet,
The mingled white and red of whose rich skin
The delicate “hare’s-foot” tenderly touched in,
And round whose parlor many a dog and cat
Stares threatfully from tidy, stool, and mat,—
Little she thinks where those sweet arts were born,
Nor how “survives the fittest” from time’s morn,
Nor heeds how far down history’s gray abysm
Her plumes “revert” by vital “atavism.”
The hungry savage, with his grim tattoo,
Made way for beauty, “better than he knew.”

The happier beast that wandered by his side,
Found house and garment in his shaggy hide;
Drank dew and rain, and from a table, spread
On all sides round without its labors fed,
And sated, slept: while snatched earth’s future lord
At more than perfect fullness could afford,
Ate, drank, and basked In sunlight, pining still
For food he knew not, and a purer rill.
To conquer life’s necessities, not he,
But the pert monkey wins that fight with glee,
Him to surpass, and all the nether breed,
Man’s arm must strike where not a brute has need,
And fruits no soil can yield, his broader nature feed.

In a dim twilight between sun and star,
Groping his slow way up to all we are,
The love of Beauty touched his cruel breast
That never more in evil’s arms could rest. 
Then first the two armed brute became a man,
And the long race of glorious Art began;
There the first step that rose from less to more,
The man-child prattling his EXCELSIOR.
With back turned broadly on the hollow dark
He paced the sunrise, pressing to his mark,
And the wild rune-song was his morning lark!
The very vices of the dragon foe,
Pride and ambition, raised him from below,
And Self, the corsait, with his lawless helm
Ploughing all seas, found out a nobler realm

Far as may seem the sachem’s ocherous stain
From hues that haunted Titian’s glowing brain,
And made Correggio’s canvass live in light,
‘Twas their day’s dawn just streaking grisly night,
A glimmer of that glorious discontent
Which marks our destiny infinite! Once bent
To find in things a use beyond their use,
In forms concrete significance abstruse,
The soul, though plunging through its reeking mire,
Goes Light-ward, thence, allegiant to a Higher.