Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/145

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This is my faith, and my mind's heritage,

Wherein I toil, though in a lonely place,

Who yet world-wide survey the human race

Unequal from wild nature disengage

Body and soul, and life's old strife assuage;

Still must abide, till heaven perfect its grace,

And love grown wisdom sweeten in man's face,

Alike the Christian and the heathen rage.

The tutelary genius of mankind

Ripens by slow degrees the final State,

That in the soul shall its foundations find

And only in victorious love grow great;

Patient the heart must be, humble the mind,

That doth the greater births of time await!

Whence not unmoved I see the nations form

From Dover to the fountains of the Rhine,

A hundred leagues, the scarlet battle-line,

And by the Vistula great armies swarm,

A vaster flood; rather my breast grows warm,

Seeing all peoples of the earth combine

Under one standard, with one countersign,

Grown brothers in the universal storm.

And never through the wide world yet there rang

A mightier summons! O Thou who from the side

Of Athens and the loins of Cæsar sprang,

Strike, Europe, with half the coming world allied

For those ideals for which, since Homer sang,

The hosts of thirty centuries have died. George Edward Woodberry