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| HAVE courage, O my comradry of dreamers! | |
| All things, except mere Earth, are ours. | |
| We pluck its passions for our flowers. | |
| Dawn-dyed our great cloud-banners toss their streamers | |
| Above its quaking tyrant-towers! | 5 |
| Making this stern grey planet shine with jewel-showers. | |
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| Our lives are mantled in forgotten glory, | |
| Like trees that fringe yon dark hill-crest | |
| Alight against the molten west. | |
| The great night shuddering yields her stress of story— | 10 |
| The dreams that stir the past’s long rest— | |
| Strange, scented night-winds sighing on our naked breast. | |
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| Through all the spirit’s spacious, secret regions— | |
| By pathways we believed unknown— | |
| Still thoughts immortal meet our own. | 15 |
| Ideas!—In innumerable legions! | |
| Like summer’s stir in forests lone | |
| Their various music merges in time’s monotone. | |
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| The dreamer sees the deep-drawn ore-veins brightening | |
| Through all the huge blind bulk of Earth; | 20 |
| He led the ship around its girth; | |
| He plays, as on the pulses of the lightning, | |
| The song that gives its workings worth, | |
| The song foredained to bring man’s morrow to the birth. | |
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| Base, base mere doers, blind and dreamless; | 25 |
| Whose bodies engines are of toil! | |
| Greasy with greed and lust they moil; | |
| They cast lots for the dreamer’s garment seamless, | |
| To rot among their useless spoil; | |
| The fathomless infinity their breath does soil. | 30 |
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| Hail to the dream that roused the sleeping savage, | |
| And let him from his bloody lair, | |
| Across light’s bridge, that single hair, | |
| Above th’ unpurposed, eyeless hell of ravage | |
| That, beasts and men, the soulless share, | 35 |
| And left him, waking in thought’s temple, Heaven’s heir! | |
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| Our souls, in these vast Heavens unbeholden | |
| Of eyes, our angel-hopes embrance; | |
| Or being’s shining trail retrace, | |
| Through pregnant skies about our forms enfolden | 40 |
| In rapture of our kindred race, | |
| Until the gaze of God consume us, face to face. | |
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| Ah, God! In what undying dream of beauty | |
| Wrought Thou our world, so strange and fair, | |
| Afloat in Thy illusive air?— | 45 |
| Aye me! We know that dreaming is our duty! | |
| These dreams more intimate than prayer; | |
| For in Thy dream divine our laureate spirits share. | |
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