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pes of fable and storied sooth Rose glorious as with gleam of gold unpriced; Eve, clothed with heavenly nakedness and youth That matched the morning's; Cain, self-sacrificed On crime's first altar: legends wise as truth, And truth in legends deep embalmed and spiced; The stars that saw the starlike eyes of Ruth, The grave that heard the clarion call of Christ. And higher than sorrow and mirth The heavenly song of earth Sprang, in such notes as might have well sufficed To still the storms of time And sin's contentious clime With peace renewed of life reparadised: Earth, scarred not yet with temporal scars; Goddess of gods, our mother, chosen among the stars. VI. Earth fair as heaven, ere change and time set odds Between them, light and darkness know not when, And fear, grown strong through panic periods, Crouched, a crowned worm, in faith's Lernean fen, And love lay bound, and hope was scourged with rods, And death cried out from desert and from den, Seeing all the heaven above him dark with gods And all the world about him marred of men. Cities that nought might purge Save the sea's whelming surge From all the pent pollutions in their pen Deep death drank down, and wrought, With wreck of all things, nought, That none might live of all their names again, Nor aught of all whose life is breath Serve any God whose likeness was not like to death. VII. Till by the lips and eyes of one live nation The blind mute world found grace to see and speak, And light watched rise a more divine creation At that more godlike utterance of the Greek, Let there be freedom. Kings whose orient station Made pale the morn, and all her presage bleak, Girt each with strengths of all his generation, Dim tribes of shamefaced soul and sun-swart cheek, Twice, urged with one desire, Son following hard on sire, With all the wrath of all a world to wreak, And all the rage of night Afire against the light Whose weakness makes her strong-winged empire weak, Stood up to unsay that saying, and fell Too far for song, though song were thousand-tongued, to tell. VIII. From those deep echoes of the loud AEgean That rolled response whereat false fear was chid By songs of joy sublime and Sophoclean, Fresh notes reverberate westward rose to bid All wearier times take comfort from the paean That tells the
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