Seven days’ work; The last day shutting ’twixt its dawn and eve, The whole work bettered, of the previous six! Since God collected and resumed in man The firmaments, the strata, and the lights, Fish, fowl, and beast, and insect,—all their trains Of various life caught back upon His arm, Reorganised, and constituted MAN, The microcosm, the adding up of works; Within whose fluttering nostrils, then, at last, Consummating Himself, the Maker sighed, As some strong winner at the foot-race sighs Touching the goal. Humanity is great; And, if I would not rather pore upon An ounce of common, ugly, human dust, An artisan’s palm, or a peasant’s brow, Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God, Than track old Nilus to his silver roots, And wait on all the changes of the moon Among the mountain-peaks of Thessaly, (Until her magic crystal round itself For many a witch to see in)—set it down As weakness,—strength by no means. How is this, That men of science, osteologists And surgeons, beat some poets, in respect For nature,—count nought common or unclean, Spend raptures upon perfect specimens Of indurated veins, distorted joints, Or beautiful new cases of curved spine; While we, we are shocked at nature’s falling off, We dare to shrink back from her warts and blains, We will not, when she sneezes, look at her, Not even to say ‘God bless her’? That’s our wrong; For that, she will not trust us often with Her larger sense of beauty and desire, But tethers us to a lily or a rose And bids us diet on the dew inside,— Left ignorant that the hungry beggar-boy (Who stares unseen against our absent eyes, And wonders at the gods that we must be, To pass so careless for the oranges!) Bears yet a breastful of a fellow-world To this world, undisparaged, undespoiled, And (while we scorn him for a flower or two, As being, Heaven help us, less poetical) Contains, himself, both flowers and firmaments And surging seas and aspectable stars, And all that we would push him out of sight In order to see nearer. Let us pray God’s grace to keep God’s image in repute; That so, the poet and philanthropist, (Even I and Romney) may stand side by side, Because we both stand face to face with men Contemplating the people in the rough,— Yet each so follow a vocation,—his And mine. I walked on, musing with myself On life and art, and whether, after all, A larger metaphysics might not help Our physics, a completer poetry Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants, More fully than the special outside plans, Phalansteries, material institutes, The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries Preferred by modern thinkers, as they thought The bread of man indeed made all his life,