Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides Into the silent hollow of the past; What is there that abides To make the next age better for the last? Is earth too poor to give us Something to live for here that shall outlive us? Some more substantial boon Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon? The little that we sec: From doubt is never free; The little that we do Is but half-nobly true; With our laborious hiving What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, Only secure in every one's conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness still we shape our fate. Whither leads the path To ampler fates that leads? Not down through flowery meads, To reap an aftermath Of youth's vainglorious weeds, But up the steep, amid the wrath And shock of deadly-hostile creeds, Where the world's best hope and stay By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way, And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. Peace hath her not ignoble wreath, Ere yet the sharp, decisive word Light the black lips of cannon, and the sword Dreams in its easeful sheath; But some day the live coal behind the thought, Whether from Baal's stone obscene, Or from the shrine serene Of God's pure altar brought, Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, And trips reproachful: "Was it, then, my praise, And not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth; Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase,