Then as old creeds fell round them into dust, They reached through science to belief in law, Made reason paramount in man, and guessed At reigning mind within the universe. Piecing the fragments of a fair design With reverent patience and courageous skill, They saw the world from chaos step by step, Under far-seeing guidance and restraint, Emerge to order and to symmetry, As logical and sure as music’s own. With Spencer, Darwin, Tyndall, and the rest, Our band saw roads of knowledge open wide Through the uncharted province of the truth, As on they fared through that unfolding world. Yet there they found no rest-house for the heart, No wells sufficient for the spirit’s thirst, No shade nor glory for the senses starved.... Turning--they fled by moonlit trails to seek The magic principality of Art, Where loveliness, not learning, rules supreme. They stood intoxicated with delight before The poised unanxious splendor of the Greek; They mused upon the Gothic minsters gray, Where mystic spirit took on mighty form, Until their prayers to lovely churches turned-- (Like a remembrance of the Middle Age They rose where Ralph or Bertram dreamed in stone); Entranced they trod a painters’ paradise, Where color wasted by the Scituate shore Between the changing marshes and the sea; They heard the golden voice of poesie Lulling the senses with its last caress In Tennysonian accents pure and fine; And all their laurels were for Beauty’s brow, Though toiling Reason went ungarlanded. Then poisonous weeds of artifice sprang up, Defiling Nature at her sacred source; And there the questing World-soul could not stay, Onward must journey with the changing time, To come to this uncouth rebellious age, Where not an ancient creed nor courtesy Is underided, and each demagogue Cries some new nostrum for the cure of ills. To-day the unreasoning iconoclast Would scoff at science and abolish art, To let untutored impulse rule the world. Let learning perish, and the race return To that first anarchy from which we came, When spirit moved upon the deep and laid The primal chaos under cosmic law. And even now, in all our wilful might, The satiated being cannot bide, But to that austere country turns again, The little province of the saints of God, Where lofty peaks rise upward to the stars From the gray twilight of Gethsemane, And spirit dares to climb with wounded feet Where justice, peace, and loving-kindness are.