Gods of the World! Their mouths are dumb! Your guns have spoken and they are dust. But the shrouded Living, whose hearts were numb, Have felt the beat of a wakening drum Within them sounding--the Dead Men's tongue-- Calling: "Smite off the ancient rust!" Have beheld "Resurrexit," the word of the Dead, Written--in--red. Bear it aloft, O roaring flame! Skyward aloft, where all may see. Slaves of the World! Our cause is the same; One is the immemorial shame; One is the struggle, and in One name-- =Manhood=--we battle to set men free. "Uncurse us the Land!" burn the words of the Dead, Written--in--red. [A] Voltairine de Cleyre's last poem. ESSAYS The Dominant Idea In everything that lives, if one looks searchingly, is limned the shadow line of an idea--an idea, dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead, with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment with the stern, immobile cast of the non-living. Daily we move among these unyielding shadows, less pierceable, more enduring than granite, with the blackness of ages in them, dominating living, changing bodies, with dead, unchanging souls. And we meet, also, living souls dominating dying bodies--living ideas regnant over decay and death. Do not imagine that I speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or of shifting Will is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its clod of earth, as in the gossamer web of being that floats and swims far over our heads in the free world of air.