hed fools that cried defeat
Lie dead amid the dust they prophesied--
Ye doubters of man's larger destiny,
Ye that despair,
Look backward down the vistaed years,
And all is battle--and all victory!
Man fought, to be a man!
Through painful centuries the slow beast fought,
Blinded and baffled, fought to gain his soul;--
Wild, hairy, shag, and feared of shadows,
Yet the clouds
Made him strange signals that he puzzled o'er;--
Beast, child, and ape,
And yet the winds harped to him, and the sea
Rolled in upon his consciousness
Its tides of wonder and romance;--
Uncouth and caked with mire,
And yet the stars said something to him, and the
sun
Declared itself a god;--
The lagging cycles turned at last
The pictures into thought,
Thought flowered in soul;--
But, oh, the myriad weary years
Ere Caliban was Shakespeare's self
And Darwin's ape had Darwin's brain!--
The battling, battling, and the steep ascent,
The fight to hold the little gained,
The loss, the doubt, the shaken heart,
The stubborn, groping slow recovery!--
But looking backward toward the dim beginnings,
You that despair,
Hath he not climbed and conquered?
Look backward and all's Victory!
What coward looks forward and foresees defeat?

III

Who climbed beside him, and who fought
And suffered and was glad?
Is she a lesser thing than he,
Who stained the slopes with bloody feet, or stood
Beside him on some hard-won eminence of hope
Exulting as the bold dawn swept
A harper hand along the ringing hills?
Flesh of his flesh, and of his soul the soul,
Hath she not fought, hath she not climbed?

And how is she a lesser thing?--
Nay, if she ever was
'Twas we that made her so, who called her queen
But kept her slave.

IV

Had she not courage for the fight?
Hath she not courage for the years to come?
Hath she not courage who descends alone--
(How pitifully alone, except for Love!)
Where man's thought even falters that would
follow,
Into the shadowy abyss
(Through vast and murmurous caverns dark with
crowding dread
And terrible with hovering wings),
To battle there with Death?--to battle
There with Death, and wrest from him,
O Conqueror and Mother,
Life!

V

Hath she too long dwelt dream-bound in the world
of love,

Unconscious of the sterner throes,
The more austere, impersonal, wide fai