w,
And with milk your breasts are full;
Your hands they are strong and subtle,
And your life-blood never dull;
But fail at the sword or the plowshare,
Or fall at the forge or the wheel,
And ye only mar earth's bosom
With a wound that her dust will heal.

Hither ye bring your workmen,
And it's ever the tale retold
Of the useless tools of the builders,
Battered and broken and old;
Hither ye bring them and lay them,
And go when your prayers are said,
For the blood of your living is dearer
Than the idle dust of your dead.

_They were three old men with hoary hair
And beards of wintry gray,
And they shouldered their spades, for their work was done,
And they left behind at the set of sun
A grave in the yellow clay._

THE TORNADO.

God let me fall from His hand
One day at His forge when the elemental world
Was shaping. I am but a breath from His great bellows,
But here among the workshops of mankind
I am a fateful scourge.

I tear red strips from the proud cities of men;
I name my passage the Highway of Instant Death;
I splinter world-old forests with my laugh,
And whirl the ancient snows of Hecla sheer into Orion's eyes.
I dance on the deep under the big Indian stars,
And wrap the water spout about my sinuous hips
As a dancer winds her girdle. The ocean's horrid crew,
The octopus, the serpent, and the shark, with the heart of a coward,
Plunge downward when they hear my feet above on the sea-floor,
And hide in their slimy coverts. Brave men pray upon the straining
decks
Till comes my mood to end them, and I strew the racing foam with
wreckage.

I am a breath from God's forge. I remember His awful workshop,
How the hot globes spun off into infinite darkness, as system by
system,
The universe was wrought; and then I remember the birth of the sun,
How God cried: "Let there be light!" and, blinding, bewildering,
exulting,
The great orb flamed from His furnace, and only the Creator stood
upright.
In that hour I fell from His hand.

I am a breath from God's forge,
And, being a part of creation, I shall also be a part of the end.
He has told me that there shall come a day
When the Seventh Angel shall open his last vial of wrath in the