Above the blue Sicilian main._

We are ourselves, and not ourselves ...
For ever thwarting pride and will
Some forebear's passion leaps from death
To claim a vital license still.

Ancestral lusts that slew and died,
Resurgent, swell each living vein;
Old doubts and faiths, new panoplied,
Dispute the mastery of the brain.

The love of liberty that flames
From written rune and stricken reed
Shook the hot hearts of swordsmen sires
At Marathon and Runnymede.

_What are these things we call our "selves"? ...
Have I not shouted, sobbed, and died
In the bright surf of spears that broke
Where Greece rolled back the Persian tide?_

Are we who breathe more quick than they
Whose bones are dust within the tomb?
Nay, as I write, what gray old ghosts
Murmur and mock me from the gloom....

They call ... across strange seas they call,
Strange seas, and haunted coasts of time....
They startle me with wordless songs
To which the Sphinx hath known the rhyme.

Our hearts swell big with dead men's hates,
Our eyes sting hot with dead men's tears;
We are ourselves, but not ourselves,
Born heirs, but serfs, to all the years!

_I rode with Nimrod ... strove at Troy ...
A slave I stood in Crowning Tyre,
A queen looked on me and I loved
And died to compass my desire._

THE WAGES

EARTH loves to gibber o'er her dross,
Her golden souls, to waste;
The cup she fills for her god-men
Is a bitter cup to taste.

Who sees the gyves that bind mankind
And strives to strike them off
Shall gain the hissing hate of fools,
Thorns, and the ingrate's scoff.

Who storms the moss-grown walls of eld
And beats some falsehood down
Shall pass the pallid gates of death
_Sans_ laurel, love or crown;

For him who fain would teach the world
The world holds hate in fee--
For Socrates, the hemlock cup;
For Christ, Gethsemane.

IN MARS, WHAT AVATAR?

"In Vishnu-land, what avatar?"
--BROWNING.

PERCHANCE the dying gods of Earth
Are destined to another birth,
And worn-out creeds regain their worth
In the kindly air of other stars--
What lords of life and light hold sway
In the myriad worlds of the Milky Way?
What avatars in Mars?

What Aphrodites from the seas
That lap the plunging Pleiades
Arise to spread afar
The dream that