I stood amidst a motley throng and felt my brain bereft of noble thought; I lived in a squalid home and despised the pity which the disdainful cast upon my lot; laughed at ribald jests and quaffed the liquid flame, and the dark-hued nectar which concealed the serpent beneath its foam; I held my head aloft to seem with pride imbued; I gibed at fortune's whim and grinned a soulless sneer at my fate to conceal a deep despair. I roamed with the savage Indians across the arid plains, stood with them in lonely worship of the great _Unknown_, and dropped like him a silent tear for the woodlands gone; the fleet-footed game no longer at his door; his father's dust, scattered by winds over consecrated and hallowed battle-plains. I stood beside the enchanted Nile and wondered at the mystery of the Sphinx; I felt the lure, the wanderlust of the mysterious arid plains and laid my body down on the desert sand to sleep, a weapon by my side; I arose to greet the rising sun and, with "_Allah_" on my tongue, bowed my head in solemn worship towards Mecca's distant domes. I wandered through Africa's torrid forest and scorching plains and sat naked before a bamboo hut; I felt the savage's freedom and his ease; I learned the songs of birds, the shriek of beasts, the omens of the moons, and kenned the dread and sacred lore which tradition single tongue had brought from the ages past and gone. I walked beside the Ganges' sacred shores, worshiped at the shrine of mighty gods and felt the spirit of the mighty _All_ vibrate through my being. I chanted the songs whose authors are forgot, and studied strange philosophies of sages passed; I starved and hungered on his arid plains; I felt the whips and scorn of cast; the curse of fated birth and the iron rule of oppression's heartless greed. I was slave, and by fortune scorned; I felt the whip cut into my quivering flesh and my blood rush hot to the gaping wound; I knew the agony of unrequited toil, and with aching limbs dragged my hopeless body to my hut, to think, but not to sleep. I learned to dream and hate, and at Nemesis' bloody altar immolated in thought and hope the whole detested tribe of human oppressors and cried _Content_. And thus I know the bondage which men endure, the realty and the delusion in what they think and feel; and the subtlety and strength of those evil forces which color his disposition and becloud his prospect. And I stand amidst his turbulent fortunes and above the storm and rage of his contentions and despairs to proclaim the divinity of his soul, and to herald a new awakening under which his quickened energies will yet surge forward in mighty waves of better things.