hings unknowable, singer of songs and seer
of visions.

And I did you honour, and gave you place by feast and fire. And of the
meat I gave you the tenderest, and of the furs the softest. Need I say
that of women you took the fairest? And you sang of the souls of dead
men and of immortality, of the hidden things, and of the wonder; you
sang of voices whispering down the wind, of the secrets of light and
darkness, and the ripple of running fountains. You told of the powers
that pulsed the tides, swept the sun across the firmaments, and held the
stars in their courses. Ay, and you scaled the sky and created for me
the hierarchy of heaven.

These things you did, Dane; but it was I who made you, and fed you, and
protected you. While you dreamed and sang, I laboured sore. And when
danger came, and there was a cry in the night, and women and children
huddling in fear, and strong men broken, and blare of trumpets and cry
of battle at the outer gate--you fled to your altars and called vainly
on your phantoms of earth and sea and sky. And I? I girded my loins,
and strapped my harness on, and smote in the fighting line; and died,
perchance, that you and the women and children might live.

And in times of peace you throve and waxed fat. But only by our brain
and blood did we men of the fighting line make possible those times of
peace. And when you throve, you looked about you and saw the beauty of
the world and fancied yet greater beauty. And because of me your fancy
became fact, and marvels arose in stone and bronze and costly wood.

And while your brows were bright, and you visioned things of the spirit,
and rose above time and space to probe eternity, I concerned myself with
the work of head and hand. I employed myself with the mastery of matter.
I studied the times and seasons and the crops, and made the earth
fruitful. I builded roads and bridges and moles, and won the secrets of
metals and virtues of the elements. Bit by bit, and with great travail,
I have conquered and enslaved the blind forces. I builded ships and
ventured the sea, and beyond the baths of sunset found new lands. I
conquered peoples, and organised nations and knit empires, and gave
periods of peace to vast territories.

And the arts of peace flourished, and you multiplied yourself in divers
ways. You were priest and singer and dancer and musician. You expressed
your fancies in colours and metals and marbles. You wrote epics and
lyrics--ay, as you to-day