t I doubt the world is growing still,
As once it grew from chaos and from night;
Or have a soul too shrunken for the hope
Which dawned in human breasts, a double morn,
With earliest watchings of the rising light
Chasing the darkness; and through many an age
Has raised the vision of a future time
That stands an angel, with a face all mild,
Spearing the demon. I, too, rest in faith
That man's perfection is the crowning flower
Towards which the urgent sap in life's great tree
Is pressing--seen in puny blossoms now,
But in the world's great morrows to expand
With broadest petal and with deepest glow.

With no disgust toward the crude and wretched life man everywhere lives
to-day, but with pity and tenderness for all sorrow, suffering and
struggle, she yet believed that the world is being shaped to a glorious
and a mighty destiny. This faith finds full and clear expression in the
concluding lines of the poem just quoted.

The faith that life on earth is being shaped
To glorious ends, that order, justice, love,
Mean man's completeness, mean effect as sure
As roundness in the dewdrop--that great faith
Is but the rushing and expanding stream
Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past.
Our finest hope is finest memory,
As they who love in age think youth is blest
Because it has a life to fill with love.
Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before
Repeating things behind: so faith is strong
Only when we are strong, shrinks when we shrink.
It comes when music stirs us, and the chords
Moving on some grand climax shake our souls
With influx new that makes new energies.
It comes in swellings of the heart and tears
That rise at noble and at gentle deeds--
At labors of the master-artist's hand
Which, trembling, touches to a finer end,
Trembling before an image seen within.
It comes in moments of heroic love,
Unjealous joy in love not made for us--
In conscious triumph of the good within,
Making us worship goodness that rebukes.
Even our failures are a prophecy,
Even our yearnings and our bitter tears
After that fair and true we cannot grasp;
As patriots who seem to die in vain
Make liberty more sacred by their pangs,
Presentiment of better things on earth
Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls
To admiration, self-renouncing love,
Or thoughts, li