The born disciple of an elder time, (To me sufficient, friendlier than the new,) Who in my blood feel motions of the Past, I thank benignant nature most for this,-- A force of sympathy, or call it lack Of character firm-planted, loosing me From the pent chamber of habitual self To dwell enlarged in alien modes of thought, Haply distasteful, wholesomer for that, And through imagination to possess, As they were mine, the lives of other men. This growth original of virgin soil, By fascination felt in opposites, Pleases and shocks, entices and perturbs. In this brown-fisted rough, this shirt-sleeved Cid, This backwoods Charlemagne of empires new, Whose blundering heel instinctively finds out The goutier foot of speechless dignities, Who, meeting Cæsar’s self, would slap his back, Call him “Old Horse,” and challenge to a drink, My lungs draw braver air, my breast dilates With ampler manhood, and I front both worlds, Of sense and spirit, as my natural fiefs, To shape and then reshape them as I will. It was the first man’s charter; why not mine? How forfeit? when deposed in other hands? Thou shudder’st, Ovid? Dost in him forbode A new avatar of the large-limbed Goth, To break, or seem to break, tradition’s clew, And chase to dreamland back thy gods dethroned? I think man’s soul dwells nearer to the east, Nearer to morning’s fountains than the sun; Herself the source whence all tradition sprang, Herself at once both labyrinth and clew. The miracle fades out of history, But faith and wonder and the primal earth Are born into the world with every child. Shall this self-maker with the prying eyes, This creature disenchanted of respect By the New World’s new fiend, Publicity, Whose testing thumb leaves everywhere its smutch, Not one day feel within himself the need Of loyalty to better than himself, That shall ennoble him with the upward look? Shall he not catch the Voice that wanders earth, With spiritual summons, dreamed or heard, As sometimes, just ere sleep seals up the sense, We hear our Mother call from deeps of time, And, waking, find it vision,--none the less The benediction bides, old skies return, And that unreal thing, pre-eminent, Makes air and dream of all we see and feel? Shall he divine no strength unmade of votes, Inward, impregnable, found soon as sought, Not cognizable of sense, o’er sense supreme? His holy places may not be of stone, Nor made with hands, yet fairer far than aught By artist feigned or pious ardor reared, Fit altars for who guards inviolate God’s chosen seat, the sacred form of man. Doubtless his church will be no hospital For superannuate forms and mumping shams, No parlor where men issue policies Of life-assurance on the Eternal Mind,