Pessimist and Optimist

Pessimist.
Do you see in what pain and anguish Earth groans, O Teacher of faith?
And how lives of utter misery leap, despairing and mad, to death?
While a last hope’s vanishing blasts them, with a glimpse of her mocking wraith?

Optimist.
Aye, well I see it, O Doubter, and more; by that very hope they are led,
When, lacking the longed-for Good, they deemed it were better they were dead;
In the rashness of despair survives a token of faith inbred.
But pain itself is of mercy; its nerves are the nerves of bliss;
‘Tis the guardian of our mortal lives, the prompter when we miss;
It has not sting for the soul or flesh, save only here danger is!

Pessimist.
Have ye marked how the earthquake’s plowshare turns under a populous town,
With homes and temples and teeming marts, as an ant-hill cleft by a clown!
And rivers of fire or water whelm sweet bowers as they thunder down?

Optimist.
Aye sooth, and I see how the swarms flock back when the terrible flood subsides;
And the hamlets climb the trembling slopes where the demon of fire abides,
Even while the rending coulter of God through its granite furrow glides!
The earthquake, fire, and torrent, and the waltzing hurricane,
Grind down, and crumble and winnow the crags to a fertile plain,
Where human lives for ages long may gather their golden grain.

Pessimist.
See the avalanche rush the traveler, and the iceberg’s Viking fleet
Run down your steel leviathans, while arrowy hail and sleet
Reap your fields for the garner of famine, who laughs at your defeat!

Optimist.
Shall the chariot wheels of steadfast Law in their infinite gyres stop short,
When a fool in his pride, or the rash and the blind would hurl themselves athwart?
The universe stands on that steadfastness; it were else the anarch’s sport.

Pessimist.
What answer, O Believer, hath your soul for solace and rest,
When you see unnumbered thousands mown down by the scythe of fest[?]
If giving them life with its loves were good is snatching them back the best?

Optimist.
Do you know, O gloomy Pessimist, that the regions whither they go
Have not full compensations for all they have missed below?
You doubt what you cannot deny; we trust the goodness we yet may bow.
The immortal soul recks little, I ween, when freed from its mortal clay,
I in flocks, like migrating birds, it flew, or took its lonely way;
Or passed as the lightning passes, or slipped from a slow decay.
A day less, or a decade, in the calends of earth is naught
To the never-ending ages whereto it is up-caught,
For a life the immemorial past in its long unfolding taught.
We have read in the course star-beams that the universe of One; 
We see in the old Earth’s lithographs her endless gain begun;
The Life in these is the Life in our souls, and God is the central sun!