whole.
Let not your faith abate,
But establish it in persons and exalt it in the state."

IV

Celia has challenged me....
Be my reply,
Challenge to poets who, with tinkling tricks,
Meet life and pass it by.
"Beauty," they ask, "in politics?"
"If you put it there," say I.

Wide the new world had opened its bright gates.
And a woman who had heard of the new world
All her life long and had saved her pence
By hard frugality, to be her competence
In the free home, came eagerly in nineteen seven
Into These States,
With her little earnings furled
In a large handkerchief--but with a heart
Too rich to be contained, for she had done her part:
She had come
With faith to Heaven.
But there was a panic that year,
No work, no wages in These States.
And a great fear
Seized on the immigrant. And so she took her pence
All of them, furled
Safe in her handkerchief, to a government cashier--
A clerk in the post-office. (And he relates
Her errand as a joke, yet tenderly
For I watched him telling me.)
... Not knowing English, being dumb,
She had brought with her a thin-faced lad
To interpret. And he made it clear,
While she unfurled
Her handkerchief and poured the heap of coins out of her hand,
That 'she was giving all she had--
To be used no matter how, you understand' ...
Lest harm should come to the new world.

O doubters of democracy,
Undo your mean contemptuous art!--
More than in all that poetry has said,
More than in mound or marble, in the living live the dead.
The past has done its reproductive part.
Hear now the cry of beauty's present needs,
Of comrades levelling a thousand creeds,
Finding futility
In conflict, selfishness, hardness of heart!
For love has many poets who can see
Ascending in the sky
Above the shadowy passes
The everlasting hills: humanity.
O doubters of the time to be,
What is this might, this mystery,
Moving and singing through democracy,
This music of the masses
And of you and me--
But purging and dynamic poetry!--
What is this eagerness from sea to sea
But young divinity!

I have seen doubters, with a puny joy,
Accept amusement for their little while
And feed upon some nourishing employ
But otherwise shake their wise heads and smile--
Protesting that one man can no more move the mass
For good or ill
Than could the ancients kindle the sun