Lo! to-day the falling waters—the ribbed white perpendicular seas—shaking the ground with their eternal thunder! Lo! above all rising like a sign into the immense height of the sky, the columned vapor and calm exhalation of their agony—

The Arisen and mighty soul of Man!

[The word runs like fire along the ground; who shall contain it? the word that is nothing—as fire is nothing and yet it devours the land in a moment.]

* * * * *

Lo! to-day the eagle soul that stretches its neck into the height, looking before and after; the living banner calling with audible inaudible voice through all times; the spirit whose eyes are heavy with gazing out over the immense world of MAN!

[O spirit! spirit! spirit! spirit! stretching thy arms out over the world,

Calling to thy children—spirit of the brow of love and feet of war and thunder—

Thou art let loose within me!

No delicate fiction art thou to me now—the sound of thy steps appals me with joy as thou stridest—fills me with joy and power.

Go, go, my soul, stream out on the wind with this one—I laugh as the ancient cities shake like leaves in the din and tumult;

Go shout on the winds that the world is alive, that the Arisen one controls it—

I laugh as the ground rocks under my feet, I laugh as I walk through the forest, and the trees reel to and fro, and their great dead branches chatter——

Shout on the winds, though the foaming hell grows hoarse with gusty thunder, shout that the crashing distracted hurrying eddying world is taken

Prisoner in the highest!]

Ah! the live Earth trembles beneath thy footsteps; the passionate deep shuddering words run along the ground: who shall contain, who shall understand them?

Surely, surely, age after age out of the ground itself arising, from the chinks of the lips of the clods and from between the blades of grass, up with the tall-growing wheat surely ascending——

Deep-muttered, vast, inaudible—they come—the strange new words, through the frame of the great Mother and through the frames of her children trembling:

* * * * *

Freedom!

And among the far nations there is a stir like the stir of the leaves of a forest.

Joy, Joy arising on Earth!

And lo! the banners lifted from point to point, and the spirits of the ancient races looking abroad—the divinely beautiful daughters of God calling to their children.

* * * * *

The nations of the old and of the new worlds!

See, what hastening of feet, what throngs, what rustling movement!

Lo! the divine East from ages and ages back intact her priceless jewel of thought—the germ of Democracy—bringing down! [Gentle and venerable India well pleased now at last to hear fulfilled the words of her ancient sages.]

Lo, Arabia! peerless in dignity, eternal in manhood of love and war—pivoting like a centre the races of mankind; Siberia, the aged mother, breaking forth uncontrollable into exultant shouting, from Kokan to farthest Kamschatka and the moss-morasses of the Arctic Sea!

See how they arise and call to each other! Norway with wild hair streaming, dancing frantic on her mountain tops? Italy from dreams, from languid passionate memories amid her marble ruins, to deeds again arising; Greece; Belgium; Denmark; Ireland—liberty’s deathless flame leaping on her Atlantic Shore!

O the wild races of Africa, beautiful children of the sun, hardy and superb, givers of gifts to the common stock without which all the other gifts were useless! The native tribes still roaming in the freedom of the earth and the waters: the Greenlander and his little boy together in their canoe towing the dead seal, the tawny bronzed Malay, and Papuan, and Australian through the interminable silent bush tracking infallibly for water or the kangaroo!

Lo! the great users and accumulators of materials, the proud and melancholy Titans struggling with civilisation! England, ringed with iron and with the glitter of her waves upon her; Germany; France; Russia—and the flow of East and West, and the throes of womanhood and the future; lo! Spain—dark, proud, voiceless, biting her lips, with high white arm beckoning beckoning! And you, too, ye manifold Stars and Stripes—unto what great destiny!

The peoples of the Earth; the intertwining many-colored streams!

China, gliding seemingly unobservant among the crowd, self-restrained, of her own soul calmly possessed; the resplendent-limbed Negro and half-caste (do you not see that old woman there with brow and nose and jaw dating conclusively back from far away Egypt?); the glitter-eyed caressing-handed Hindu, suave thoughtful Persian, and faithful Turk; Mexico and the Red Indian (O unconscious pleading eyes of the dying races!); Japan and the Isles of the Pacific, and the caravan wanderers and dwellers in the oases of Sahara.

O glancing eyes! O leaping shining waters! Do I not know that thou Democracy dost control and inspire, that thou, too, hast relations to these—and a certainty—

As surely as Niagara has relations to Erie and Ontario?