Soldiers! Comrades! What is most real, our waking hours, our dreams? Where was I in this sleep? What are our dreams But lands which lie below our hour’s horizon, Yet still are seen in a reflecting sky, And which through earth and heaven draw us on? Look at me now! Consider of yourselves: Housed, fed, yet lonely, in this futile task By this great water, in this waste of grass, Close to this patch of forest, on this river Where wolves howl, and the Indian waits his chance-- Consider of your misery, your sense Of worthless living, living to no end: I tell you no man lives but to some end. He may live only to increase the mass Wherewith Fate is borne-down, or just to swell The needed multitude when the hero passes, To give the hero heart! But every man Walks, though in blindness, to some destiny Of human growth, who only helps to fill, And helps that way alone, the empty Fate That waits for lives to give it Life. And look Here are we housed and fed, here is a fire And here a bed. A hundred years ago Marquette, La Salle, scarce housed and poorly fed Gave health and life itself to find the way Through icy marshes, treacherous swamps and forests For this Fort Dearborn, where to-night we sit Warming ourselves against a roaring hearth. And what’s our part? It is not less than theirs. And what’s the part of those to come? Not less Than ours has been! And what’s the life of man? To live up to the God in him, to obey The Voice which says: You shall not live and rest. Nor sleep, nor mad delight nor senses fed, Nor memory dulled, nor tortured hearing stopped To drown my Voice shall leave you to forget Life’s impulse at the heart of Life, to strive For men to be, for cities, nobler states Moving foreshadowed in your dreams at night, And realized some hundred years to come. When this Fort Dearborn, you and all of you, And I who sit with pipe and son on knee, Regretting a dear daughter, who this hour Is somewhere in the darkness (like our souls Which move in darkness, listening to the beat Of our mysterious hearts, or with closed eyes Sensing a central Purpose) shall be dust-- Our triumphs, sorrows, even our names forgotten. And all we knew lost in the wreck and waste And change of things. And even what we did For cities, nobler states, and greater men Forgotten too. It matters not. We work For cities, nobler states and greater men, Or else we die in Life which is the death Which soldiers must not die! III EMILY BROSSEAU: IN CHURCH _Domine, Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae, libera animas omnium fidelium defunctorum de poenis inferni, et de profundo lacu._