I charge you, O traveler, that you disbelieve not—a voice comes in the cool of the evening:

I charge you that in the secret unspoken word you disbelieve not, sacred, and the first almighty Thing,

Moving among cities and over the open sea—advancing to deliverance in us;

Night and day, youth and old age, willing and unwilling—advancing to deliverance in us.

Dumb and of no account, her beauty now and then only (or at night when no one is near) before the glass disrobing, trembling, lonely, unresponded—yet mightier than all the array and splendor of the Earth—I charge you that you do not disbelieve!

* * * * *

Outwards all proceeds: Brahma from himself sheds and shreds the universes; I from myself, you from yourself.

To-day the slave goes first, in his chains, and the voiceless, and those that are without arguments and always in the wrong;

And the prisoner with slouched head, and the suspected and insulted in rags, and those whose hearts bleed silently because of what they see;

And the old forsaken mother, and the cast-aside woman, and the child, and the favorless and the drunkard shall go first;

The mechanic to-day shall go before his master, the bricklayer shall be saluted in the street before the architect, the navvy shall be accounted more than the politician, and I will give the illiterate the advantage of those that read and write.

The scouted and the exiled and the unheard-of, laborers in the fields and in mines, quarrymen and limekilners and brickburners and makers and cleaners of drains and household drudges, shall be nearest in honor: the burdened of every day, and the sufferers, the over-worked and hope-forlorn, and the concealers of sin and sorrow and despair, shall head the procession.

And with them One (of whom I have spoken) moving unseen hither and thither—side by side first with one and then with another—shall resume and make all plain, shall be himself the beginning and ending of it all.