Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried, The man’s mind opened under weight of cloud. To penetrate the dark was it endowed; Stood day before a vision shooting wide. Whereat the spectral enemy lost form; The traversed wilderness exposed its track. He felt the far advance in looking back; Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm. Under the low-browed tempest’s eye of ire, That ere it lightened smote a coward heart, Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwart All ventures perilous his shrouded Sire; A stranger still, religiously divined; Not yet with understanding read aright. But when the mind, the cherishable mind, The multitude’s grave shepherd, took full flight, Himself as mirror raised among his kind, He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight: Knew that his force to fly, his will to see, His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain, Had come of many a grip in mastery, Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain, And of his bosom made him lord, to keep The starry roof of his unruffled frame Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep Below, above, aye with a wistful aim. The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown, By traitor inmates baited, upward burned; Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned, The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown. To whom unwittingly did he aspire In wilderness, where bitter was his need: To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed For light and air, he struck through crimson mire. But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp, And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed, All choral in its fruitful garden camp, The spiritual the palpable illumed.