Augment the range of human power,
And trust to coming years.
They may call thee wizard, and monk accursed,
And load thee with dispraise;
Thou wert born five hundred years too soon
For the comfort of thy days;
But not too soon for human kind.
Time hath reward in store;
And the demons of our sires become
The saints that we adore.
The blind can see, the slave is lord,
So round and round we run;
And ever the Wrong is proved to be wrong
And ever is Justice done.

Keep, Galileo, to thy thought,
And nerve thy soul to bear;
They may gloat o'er the senseless words they wring
From the pangs of thy despair;
They may veil their eyes, but they cannot hide
The sun's meridian glow;
The heel of a priest may tread thee down
And a tyrant work thee woe;
But never a truth has been destroyed;
They may curse it and call it crime;
Pervert and betray, or slander and slay
Its teachers for a time.
But the sunshine aye shall light the sky,
As round and round we run;
And the Truth shall ever come uppermost,
And Justice shall be done.

And live there now such men as these--
With thoughts like the great of old?
Many have died in their misery,
And left their thought untold;
And many live, and are ranked as mad,
And are placed in the cold world's ban,
For sending their bright, far-seeing souls
Three centuries in the van.
They toil in penury and grief,
Unknown, if not maligned;
Forlorn, forlorn, bearing the scorn
Of the meanest of mankind!
But yet the world goes round and round,
And the genial seasons run;
And ever the Truth comes uppermost,
And ever is Justice done.

--Charles Mackay.

We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the heart resides.
The spirit bloweth and is still;
In mystery our soul abides:
But tasks in hours of insight willed
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish 'twere done.
Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern.

--Matthew Arnold.

WHAT MAKES A HERO?

What makes a hero?--not success, not fame,
Inebriate merchants, and the loud acclaim