About his AEthiop Highlands Nile is Nile, Though not the stream of the paternal smile:
And where his tide of nourishment he drives, An Abyssinian wantonness revives.
Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;
He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs, The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.
To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers, He is the vast Insensate who devours His golden promise over leagues of seed, Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.
The races which on barbarous force begin, Inherit onward of their origin, And cancelled blessings will the current length Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.
'Tis not in men to recognize the need Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.
Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.
Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed, For tens up the safe mountains at his head.
Few would be fed, not far his course prolong, Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.
- That rings of truth! More do your people thrive;Your Many are more merrily alive Than erewhile when I gloried in the page Of radiant singer and anointed sage.
Greece was my lamp: burnt out for lack of oil;Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!
All structures built upon a narrow space Must fall, from having not your hosts for base.
O thrice must one be you, to see them shift Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift;With faith, that of privations and spilt blood, Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!
And thrice must one be you, to wait release From duress in the swamp of their increase.
At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest, A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed, Philosophers behold; desponding view.
Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins, Dive down the fumy AEtna of their brains.
Belated vessels on a rising sea, They seem: they pass!
- But not Philosophy!
- Ay, be we faithful to ourselves: despise Nought but the coward in us! That way lies The wisdom making passage through our slough.
Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.
Philosophy is Life's one match for Fate.
That photosphere of our high fountain One, Our spirit's Lord and Reason's fostering sun, Philosophy, shall light us in the shade, Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.
Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed, Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!
Advantage to the Many: that we name God's voice; have there the surety in our aim.
This thought unto my sister do I owe, And irony and satire off me throw.
They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds, Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.
Now let the perils thicken: clearer seen, Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.
Who never yet of scattered lamps was born To speed a world, a marching world to warn, But sunward from the vivid Many springs, Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.
Fragments of the Iliad in English Hexameter Verse
