What waste Thought Merival, of spirit, but what waste Of spirit in the lives he knew! What homes Where children starve for bread, or starve for love, Half satisfied, half-schooled are driven forth With aspirations broken, or with hopes Or talents bent or blasted! O, what wives Drag through the cheerless days, what marriages Cling and exhaust to death, and warp and stain The children! If a business, like this farm, Were run on like economy, a year Would see its ruin! But he thought, at last, Of spiritual economy, so to save The lives of men and women, use their powers To ends that suit. And thus when on a time A miner lost his life there at LeRoy, And when the inquest found the man was killed Through carelessness of self, while full of drink, Merival, knowing that the drink was caused By hopeless toil and by a bitter grief Touching a daughter, who had strayed and died, First wondered if in cases like to this Good might result, if there was brought to light All secret things; and in the course of time, If many deaths were probed, a store of truth Might not be gathered which some genius hand Could use to work out laws, instructions, systems For saving and for using wasting spirits, So wasted in the chaos, in the senseless Turmoil and madness of this reckless life, Which treats the spirit as the cheapest thing, Since it is so abundant. Thoughts like these Led Merival to run for coroner. The people wondered why he sought the office. But when they gave it to him, and he used His private purse to seek for secret faults, In lives grown insupportable, for causes Which prompted suicide, the people wondered, The people murmured sometimes, and his foes Mocked or traduced his purpose. Merival The coroner is now two years in office When Henry Murray's daughter Elenor Found by the river, gives him work to do In searching out her life's fate, cause of death, How, in what manner, and by whom or what Said Elenor's dead body came to death; And of all things which might concern the same, With all the circumstances pertinent, Material or in anywise related, Or anywise connected with said death. And as in other cases Merival Construed the words of law, as written above: All circumstances material or related, Or anywise connected with said death, To give him power as coroner to probe To ultimate secrets, causes intimate In birth, environment, crises of the soul, Grief, disappointment, hopes deferred or ruined. So now he exercised his power to strip This woman's life of vestments, to lay bare Her soul, though other souls should run and rave For nakedness and shame.