Page:The Statues in the Block and Other Poems (1881).djvu/108

102 Ah, pity them, God! they must always choose, For the life to gain and the death to lose. They dream of the woods and the mountain spring, And they grasp the flower, to clutch the sting.

Even so: they are better than those who bend Like beasts to the lash, and go on to the end As a beast will go, with to-day for a life, And to-morrow a blank. Offer peace and strife To a man enslaved—let him vote for ease And coward labor, and be content; Or let him go out in the front, as these, With their eyes on the doom and the danger, went. And take your choice—the man who remains A self-willed serf, or the one who stains His sudden hand with a drive for light Through a bristling rank and a gloomy night. This man for me—for his heart he'll share With a friend: with a foe, he'll fight him fair.