The seeming-able, who all but scored, From their teeming tribe we come: What was there wrong with us, O Lord, That our lives were dark and dumb? The men ten-talented, who still Strangely missed of the goal, Of them we are: it seems Thy will To harrow some in soul. We are the sinners, too, whose lust Conquered the higher claims; We sat us prone in the common dust, And played at the devil’s games. We are the hard-luck folk, who strove Zealously, but in vain: We lost and lost, while our comrades throve, And still we lost again. We are the doubles of those whose way Was festal with fruits and flowers; Body and brain we were sound as they, But the prizes were not ours. A mighty army our full ranks make; We shake the graves as we go; The sudden stroke and the slow heartbreak, They both have brought us low. And while we are laying life’s sword aside, Spent and dishonored and sad, Our epitaph this, when once we have died, “The weak lie here, and the bad.” We wonder if this can be really the close, Life’s fever cooled by death’s trance; And we cry, though it seem to our dearest of foes, “God give us another chance!” The ease of the poem, the crisp Anglo-Saxon which it uses, the forthright stating of the case for the weaker side, and the humanity underlying it, are admirable; and, further, from an artistic standpoint it is a stronger piece of work than it would have been had its philosophy chimed better with modern thinking. The unsuccessful are speaking; their view-point and not necessarily the author’s is presented. To have tacked on a clause additional, with a hint of the inner laws that govern success, might have saved the philosophy from impeachment as to falling back upon Providence; but it would have been a decidedly false note put into the mouth of the unsuccessful. We may say at once that The men ten-talented who still Strangely missed of the goal, were the Amiels who suffered paralysis of the will to benumb them, rather than those whom it was the will of the Creator to “harrow in soul;” but it would scarcely be expected of the Amiels themselves to analyze their deficiencies thus openly to the multitude. Impotence of will, however, is not at the root of all failure; who can deny that there is The clan of those whose kin Were a millstone dragging them down; that there are The hard-luck folk who strove Zealously, but in vain; and The seeming-able, who all but scored, who put forth apparently more effort to score than did many of the victors, but who were waylaid by some invidious circumstance, or who failed to “grasp the skirts of happy chance” as the flying goddess passed them?