ars
Are all within its baleful balance thrown.
It beats upon the organ of our lives, and history repeats
the wild, discordant moan.
So nations, whose lost anchorage must pay
The penalty of their forgetfulness,
Seek out phantasmal deities to prey
Upon their vitals in their sore distress.

Mars, or Mexitli[E]: though the one be crowned
With all the glory that bedecks old Rome,
The idols of the other, fiercely ground
To powdered pulp by Spain's invading host.
How much of agony they both have cost
Ask of the millions lost to life and home!
Ambition makes a Caesar: it is well
It gives some recompense for all its crime;
For it has made the earth an endless hell,
Crowding its woes upon the lap of time--
And yet, religion spurs it to the test,
And priests have been the primates of its throne,
Chanting their auguries to fire its breast,
Braying all history with their undertone.
Nor is the "manger," with its cradled Christ,
Free from the misinterpreting of Priest.
The cross where God and man have kept their tryst,
Been changed to leaven for inglorious feast--
God! must future draw its cadence from the past,
And plow its furrow through the same red mould?
Must nations be in the same furnace cast,
And man, the master, bought, and scourged, and sold?
Then is creation but a lie accursed,
And better that the doom upon it burst.
No. Though experience may slowly turn,
And man may learn as slowly, yet we learn.
The risen Christ did break the grasp of death,
And empire, dead in trespasses, will yet receive its breath.

Aztlan must pass through all the fated field
Of mythologic peculence and lore,
And to their sturdy priestcraft blindly yield,
To cipher out the destinies in store.
They must propitiate the gods with blood,
Especially their war-god must be fed,
And to supply their deities with food
Their fated subjects must be freely bled.
So superstition whets the fatal blade,
Which culminates in human sacrifice.
The maw of Huitzilopotchli[F] mu