Plastic and beautiful, and running over With Schiller's 'play impulse,' was the genius of Greece, Of which her institutions and civility were the embodiment. Other autumn times of the nations Were calm and peaceful, Symbolized above, as fruit on the branches Of the life-tree, Igdrasil! And when their time came, They dropped down silently, Like apples from their boughs on the autumn grass; Silently dropped down, on moonlight plains, In the presence of the great company of the stars, And the flaming constellations, Which evermore keep solemn watch over their graves. Others were blown off suddenly, And prematurely--all the elements enraged against them; And others, like the Dead Sea fruit, Were rotten at the heart before their prime! The old mound builder stands at the base of the tree, At the base of the wonderful tree Igdrasil, And the mighty branches thereof, Which hang over his head in flame-shadows, Germinated, and blossomed with nations, In other lands, in another hemisphere Far away, over the measureless brine, From the mother earth where he was planted, Where he grew and flourished, And solved the riddle of life, And tried death, And the riddle beyond death. He thought this passionate America, With its vast results of physical life, Its beautiful and sublime portraitures, Its far-sweeping prairies, rolling in grassy waves Like the green billows of an inland sea-- Its blue-robed mountains Piercing the bluer heavens with their peaks-- Its rivers, lakes, and forests-- A roomy, and grand-enough earth to inhabit, Without thought of anything beyond it. And yet he is related to all That was, and is, and shall be! That idea which was clothed in his flesh Is fleshed in I know not how many Infinite forms and varieties, In every part of the earth, In this day of my generation. But the flesh is a little different, And here and there the organism a nobler one, And the idea bigger, broader, deeper, Of a more divine quality and diapason. He is included in us, as the lesser in the greater; All our enactments are repetitions of his; Enlarged and adorned; And we pass through all his phases, Some time or other, in our beginnings-- Through his, and an infinity of larger ones-- And we have the same inevitable endings. A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE: ITS POSSIBILITY, SCIENTIFIC NECESSITY, AND APPROPRIATE CHARACTERISTICS