Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead.
As the deer breaks--as the steer breaks--from the herd where they
graze,
In the faith of little children we went on our ways.
Then the wood failed--then the food failed--then the last water
dried--
In the faith of little children we lay down and died.

"On the sand-drift--on the veldt-side--in the fern-scrub we lay,
That our sons might follow after by the bones on the way.
Follow after--follow after! We have watered the root
And the bud has come to blossom that ripens for fruit!
Follow after--we are waiting by the trails that we lost
For the sound of many footsteps, for the tread of a host.

"Follow after--follow after--for the harvest is sown:
By the bones about the wayside ye shall come to your own!"

This was the vision that called to Roger Williams,--that "prophetic soul
ravished of truth disembodied," "unable to enter into treaty with its
environment," and forced to seek the wilderness. "Oh, how sweet," wrote
William Penn, from his forest refuge, "is the quiet of these parts,
freed from the troubles and perplexities of woeful Europe." And here he
projected what he called his "Holy Experiment in Government."

If the later West offers few such striking illustrations of the relation
of the wilderness to idealistic schemes, and if some of the designs were
fantastic and abortive, none the less the influence is a fact. Hardly a
Western State but has been the Mecca of some sect or band of social
reformers, anxious to put into practice their ideals, in vacant land,
far removed from the checks of a settled form of social organization.
Consider the Dunkards, the Icarians, the Fourierists, the Mormons, and
similar idealists who sought our Western wilds. But the idealistic
influence is not limited to the dreamers' conception of a new State. It
gave to the pioneer farmer and city builder a restless energy, a quick
capacity for judgment and action, a belief in liberty, freedom of
opportunity, and a resistance to the domination of class which infused a
vitality and power into the individual atoms of this democratic mass.
Even as he dwelt among the stumps of his newly-cut clearing, the pioneer
had the creative vision of a new order of society. In imagination he
pushed back the forest boundary to the confines of a mighty
Commonwealth; he willed that log cabins should become the lofty
build