and unfolding of almighty wings.

I bent with tears and pitying hands,
Above these dusky star-eyed children,--
Crinkly-haired, with sweet-sad baby voices,
Pleading low for light and love and living--
And I crooned:

"Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair;
Guerdon for your deep distress,
He shall send His tenderness;
For the tripping of your feet
Make a mystic music sweet
In the darkness of your hair;
Light and laughter in the air--
Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair!"

I strode above the stricken, bleeding men,
The rampart 'ranged against the skies,
And shouted:
"Up, I say, build and slay;
Fight face foremost, force a way,
Unloose, unfetter, and unbind;
Be men and free!"

Dumbly they shrank,
Muttering they pointed toward that peak,
Than vastness vaster,
Whereon a darkness brooded,
"Who shall look and live," they sighed;
And I sensed
The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.

Yet did we build of iron, bricks, and blood;
We built a day, a year, a thousand years,
Blood was the mortar,--blood and tears,
And, ah, the Thing, the Thing of wings,
The winged, folding Wing of Things
Did furnish much mad mortar
For that tower.

Slow and ever slower rose the towering task,
And with it rose the sun,
Until at last on one wild day,
Wind-whirled, cloud-swept and terrible
I stood beneath the burning shadow
Of the peak,
Beneath the whirring of almighty wings,
While downward from my feet
Streamed the long line of dusky faces
And the wail of little children sobbing under earth.

Alone, aloft,
I saw through firmaments on high
The drama of Almighty God,
With all its flaming suns and stars.
"Freedom!" I cried.
"Freedom!" cried heaven, earth, and stars;
And a Voice near-far,
Amid the folding and unfolding of almighty wings,
Answered, "I am Freedom--
Who sees my face is free--
He and his."

I dared not look;
Downward I glanced on deep-bowed heads and closed eyes,
Outward I gazed on flecked and flaming blue--
But ever onward, upward flew
The sobbing of small voices,--
Down, down, far down into the night.

Slowly I lifted livid limbs aloft;
Upward I strove: the face! the face!
Onward I reeled: the