All ills are one; the green earth has no weed
But in man’s heart is its incarnate type;
No hungry desert with its viprous breed
But glares and coils its eidolon, decreed
In his scorched bosom by their common need;
No rank morass – death’s purple vineyard, ripe
With pestilence – that springs from other seed
Than this, grown rankly to a bad increase
In sin’s mephitic fen-reek! Earth awaits
Her purified lord to lift the pearly gates
Of her own lustral waters; man must be
Pure and serene as heaven ere she may cease
To nurse her plagues of want and misery,
Or hush her trembling bosom into peace.
One hollow want, imperious over all
Earth and her children, tortures them alike;
Makes passions burna nd lurid lightnings fall,
Agues the flesh and shakes the groaning ball,
Points the rude thistle and the spearman’s pike,
Bids death and hail the hopes and harvests strike,
Kindles volcanoes and volcanic crime,
Shame, blight, and scorn, and coldly burning rime,
Earth, bease and man, involving in one pall!
From every finite join innumerous tongues
That ring to heaven one infinite hunger-call,
Insatiable Life’s appeal from many wrongs
To the more good that evermore belongs
To all the things that aspire to glad life’s coronal!
No being shall find its fullness till God fill
The lowliest to its lowly need, that still
Swells to perpetual growth in His one plan
For earth unfinished, and unfinished man
Through whose deep sentience and triumphant will,
Working together since the race began,
The good shall pass to nature and to him.
With one broad tide the seas of life shall flow
The thousand gulfs of hungry want and woe,
And flood creation to its silver brim,
Heaven’s Milky Way, o’er which its waves shall swim
To kiss their fountain mother, just below
The Eternal Throne, where Life’s All-Father, God,
Sends down one vital throb to living soul and sod.
Nature and Man are of the self-same blood;
No whole delight can crown the seraphim
While any heart stands wholly barred from good;
No sun be perfect while one soul is dim;
Through star and man, and man’s divine abode,
Far throbs the fire-pulse of the Elohim,
That melts all being to one brotherhood,
Where highest life is foremost pioneer
Of Renovation in her grand career,
Toiling with axe and spade, and every word
Of the creative fiat, to uprear
A highway for the ransomed of the Lord,
To make his paths straight in the wilderness,
By soul and heart and tongue, and hardy hands no less.
Fulfill the law of royal brotherhood
With man and earth, and words beyond our ken
In starry mist, O toiling sons of men,
So linking filial hands with that one Good
Who is law, life, and life’s exhaustless food.
Be wise, and free, and loving; nobly then
May ye drain down corruption’s deadly fen,
Gather, in deserts of the heart or earth,
Your golden sheaves of plenty, and outhang
Beauty’s broad banner, flashing like a birth
Of lightning silent of its thunder-pang,
Old Fraud will perish with the jarring clang
Of his fierce traffic; Love crown work and worth,
And grave content toil on to songs of shouting mirth!
