Amos Niven Wilder

“ Leading men surely towards an unseen mark.
When shall we see their like on earth again,
Blown like the seed of some celestial flower
By tempests from the very skirts of Power
Across the interplanetary main;
Living and loving air and light and sod,
Finding in the dark universe a home,
Transfiguring all they touch where'er they roam,
And hearing close at hand the warm heartbeat of God? ”

“ The old year races on its blind
⁠Accelerating voyage towards the end.
No more for them earth's fleet career
⁠Hastening down the runways of the dark,
No more the phantoms of the year
⁠Coursing like mindless winds through treetops stark.
No more for them the fleeting suns
⁠Breeding new fret and stir upon the earth,
No more the din, the oaths, the guns,
⁠These throb not past the gates of death and birth.
No more for them time's dark events
⁠Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky,
The fury of the elements
⁠No more shall rage upon them where they lie. ”

“ And spurn the gods to whom peace bids me bow.
And I remember ancient loyalties
And ardent ships of hope that have been wrecked
On sordid shores, and brooding much on these,
Prospect grows pallid before retrospect,
And all the hallowed passions of the years,
And all ideal longings, and dear pain,
And dedicated griefs, and secret tears,
Sweep back to overpower me again.
... Yet all that we have loved is part of us,
And those great hours are builded in our lives,
That vanished dream is yet the heart of us
And through the present still for utterance strives. ”

“ A marred lot from the potter's wheel is tossed;
Divining though a million lives are scrapped
And flung to rot like carrion on the plain,
Yet human life is islanded and lapped
In tides of quiet that transcend all pain. ”

“ Of all the earth belong,—our dearth, our crime
He overlooked, and in an hour sublime
Led us out to the eternal battle-fields
Where through the ages His own sword He wields
To prove us worthy of our country's prime. ”

“ Transmuted imperfection into art
And built up glory from relinquished dreams
And made of clay memorial to stilled prayer,
Giving our silted graves power in the light,
Our dusted mouths voice in the upper air.
Yet every building shall be razed, nor shall
There rest one stone upon another placed
By our primeval days, for in the time
Of consummation such communities
Of worship, and such habitations
Shall rise, that all our most ethereal spires,
Our flame-transmuted monuments shall seem
But lead to gold or clay to alabaster ”

“ Who feels not where the battle-work is grim
A cloud of witnesses, a tidal wave
Of earth's best passion brim along the front,
Weighing upon him and exalting him,
Leaving the world at ebb to make him brave. ”

“ O we who live must envious grow
To think on you—and you—and you—
We left back on that great plateau
Of passion and of faith, for to
That height again we may not climb
Who are descended into time. ”

“ We are but dreamers in the womb of time,⁠
Impinged on through the play of circumstance
By outer majesties, and in the dance
Of hours and life's illusory pantomime
Shadowed and brooded o'er by the sublime;
Blind fæti nourished through the world of chance,
Our matrix and our prison, we advance
From dream to dream as all flesh since its prime. ”

“ There is no ebb in nature without answering flow.
⁠When summer's tide of green
⁠Retreats to depths unseen
And earth is bare beneath the usurping snow,
None doubt that from its unplumbed levels deep
⁠The tides of spring will creep
To submerge the world again in emerald seas.
So shall life's flood retire from its estuaries. ”

“ From rifts and rents in nature's worn disguise,
The sackcloth vesture that God's splendour drapes
Crumbles to ashes, and before our eyes
The earth takes fire with beauty and its shapes
Glow in apocalypse that gains the skies. ”

“ The time-washed stones her inner impulse own,
The star-cleansed pinnacles are lucent grown
Touched to still, unconsuming fire by dint
Of time's slow conflagration that transmutes
To mist and flame the gross earth of the brutes. ”

“ Wherein a holier race shall walk in peace,
Sharers, by faith acquired through our stress,
In treasuries of splendour past our guess,
In whose deep hearts our pain and joy shall live,
As in their airiest temples, their sublimest towers
There shall rest token of our humbler shafts
In line and curve inbuilt into their art,
Our hope and aim ingrown into their faiths. ”

“ We started as they bade us like the simples of the past,
And but for you who blazoned out the virtue in our cause
We also would have died the fools of avarice and caste.
You saved us from that holocaust renewed once more to greed,
You saved us from the blind and beastly grapple in the mists,
You called us to a battle on the heights, we saw you lead
The faithless and despairing hosts to the eternal lists ”

“ It gives me pause to think the laws
Of death are of such adamant
That towers that win high heaven's applause
And pinnacles where angels chant
And stones that guard an age extant
Perish like sticks and straws. ”

“ Their newer ventures, sports, high-hearted games,
And comrade-covenants in new crusades,
And forays past the veil, and eager raids
Across forbidden borders, new surprise,
And new unguessed, cerulean ecstasies?
So some companion who has faced the trail
And topped the summits with his comrades oft,
But now condemned to halt within the vale,
Watches the gallant company aloft
Upon the towering hills pass out of sight
With mutual shout and dear encouragement,
And mourns their love eclipsed by new delight,
And longs to follow by the way they went. ”

“ By their sublime attractiveness they win
The world from its fatality of sin,
⁠And from the common lot
⁠Desiring no exemption,
Their blamelessness with mighty power is fraught
⁠When joined with pain,
⁠For so Redemption,
Redemption lifts its mighty cross again!
⁠So swerved
By love's vast leverage from its ancient grooves
And changeless cycles of eternal wars,
⁠The planet moves
To grander revolutions among softer stars
And skies unblasted by the beams of Mars,
To placid periods under milder rays,
Pacific seasons, august nights and days. ”

“ That generation unto generation still
⁠Contrives to will.
Errors, obscenities and passions breed,
⁠With germs of violence rife,
As in a culture fitted to that end
⁠In human life,
Nor need man to their breeding his impulsion lend. ”

“ That we should live when you have died?
Wherein less worthy or less true
That unto us it was denied
So great a gift as life to give?
Wherein more immature than you
That you could die and we must live? ”

“ The noisy years, in gestured prophecy.
So shall the centuries invade the years,
So shall the great Dead and Unborn be brought
To life to summon from the quick, their peers,
And weight our age with import past all thought. ”

“ Against a threatening cosmos! crucified,
Hang naked and alone in careless scorn,
Though all the slaves of power sweep in rage
Against him; for unto his riven side
He summons champions from another bourne. ”

“ BURIED ABROAD.
Wide roll the waves between us and our dead
And silence muffles every questing cry,
A world of traffic thwarts each yearning sped,
Empires of sun and shadow sundering lie.
Islanded in a radiance of the past,
Sunk in the deepening flood-tide of the days,
Wrenched from our care, where they were anchored fast,
By the ancient harsh oblivion of the race ”

“ Stirring the old-gold of the leaves of fall
By pillared beeches, tarnished, blue, and tall,
And splashed with argent sunlight, where at last,
While this one weeps and that one sadly smiles,
They learn compassion for the atrocious past. ”

“ Cast by the Church upon the atrocious years;
Untamed and best beloved daughter of God,
Adorable in passion, grand in tears,
Sublime in victory! how God must long
To win you wholly who are so much His. ”

“ Outwearing strife, evoking gentler times.
The carillons above the wretched years,
Above the squalid roofs, the unearthly choir,
The choral hours showering high desire
On men's dull hearts, dark vision, and deaf ears. ”

“ To know that genii showed themselves those months
Often, scaling horizons, bent on tasks
Out of proportion to these times of peace,
And that great prodigies of ministrants
In aural loveliness would brood at night,
Extraordinary comforters, come down
To cope with like extraordinary pain. ”

“ Chaos thrust forth his fingers o'er the land,
And as when seas encroach upon a strand,
Moved, an immeasurable flood of Night,
Across the spring, while men and beasts in flight
Avoided the dark terror close at hand ”

“ United Love to man's extremest ill.
3.
O Thou Whom men call Father, Who dost taste
An infinite pain in infinite ways, and share
⁠Each pang we bear,
Pierced through with sorrow at the abysmal waste
⁠Wherewith the creature
Gropes his way on in age-long strife with nature,
⁠How shall these know of Thee
Whose years were circled with malignancy? ”

“ Faints, and the lingering dead pause to mark how
The thoughts of many hearts shall be revealed,
Jealous of all their blood-bought testament.
The world's an amphitheatre; Versailles
'Twixt quick and dead dictates a century. ”

“ They cling about our hems tenaciously;
⁠Their cries unnerve our ardour.
⁠We needs must take account
That to earth's farthest cape man is his brother's warder.
Man has one soul and where aught human's ill
Its far contagion blasts each member still ”

“ A war of genii and a spectre strife,
Enveloped in an Æschylean shade.
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The dead are gone and we are left alive
And those incredible and awful days
Are now no more. Nay, e'en their memory
Grows faded, and the fates that gave us them
Seem jealous that we should retain so much
As of forbidden knowledge. ”