LITMIR.BIZ

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portraits of the past users also,

      The primal patient mechanics, the architects and engineers,

      The far-off Assyrian edifice and Mizra edifice,

      The Roman lictors preceding the consuls,

      The antique European warrior with his axe in combat,

      The uplifted arm, the clatter of blows on the helmeted head,

      The death-howl, the limpsy tumbling body, the rush of friend and foe thither,

      The siege of revolted lieges determin’d for liberty,

      The summons to surrender, the battering at castle gates, the truce and parley,

      The sack of an old city in its time,

      The bursting in of mercenaries and bigots tumultuously and disorderly,

      Roar, flames, blood, drunkenness, madness,

      Goods freely rifled from houses and temples, screams of women in the gripe of brigands,

      Craft and thievery of camp-followers, men running, old persons despairing,

      The hell of war, the cruelties of creeds,

      The list of all executive deeds and words just or unjust,

      The power of personality just or unjust.

      4

      Muscle and pluck forever!

      What invigorates life invigorates death,

      And the dead advance as much as the living advance,

      And the future is no more uncertain than the present,

      For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the delicatesse of the earth and of man,

      And nothing endures but personal qualities.

      What do you think endures?

      Do you think a great city endures?

      Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared constitution? or the best built steamships?

      Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d’oeuvres of engineering, forts, armaments?

      Away! these are not to be cherish’d for themselves,

      They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them,

      The show passes, all does well enough of course,

      All does very well till one flash of defiance.

      A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,

      If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

      5

      The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch’d wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely,

      Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the anchor-lifters of the departing,

      Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops selling goods from the rest of the earth,

      Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place where money is plentiest,

      Nor the place of the most numerous population.

      Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,

      Where the city stands that is belov’d by these, and loves them in return and understands them,

      Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,

      Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,

      Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,

      Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases,

      Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons,

      Where fierce men and women pour forth as the sea to the whistle of death pours its sweeping and unript waves,

      Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority,

      Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President, Mayor, Governor and what not, are agents for pay,

      Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on themselves,

      Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,

      Where speculations on the soul are encouraged,

      Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men,

      Where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men;

      Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands,

      Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,

      Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,

      Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,

      There the great city stands.

      6

      How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!

      How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a man’s or woman’s look!

      All waits or goes by default till a strong being appears;

      A strong being is the proof of the race and of the ability of the universe,

      When he or she appears materials are overaw’d,

      The dispute on the soul stops,

      The old customs and phrases are confronted, turn’d back, or laid away.

      What is your money-making now? what can it do now?

      What is your respectability now?

      What are your theology, tuition, society, traditions, statute-books, now?

      Where are your jibes of being now?

      Where are your cavils about the soul now?

      7

      A sterile landscape covers the ore, there is as good as the best for all the forbidding appearance,

      There is the mine, there are the miners,

      The forge-furnace is there, the melt is accomplish’d, the hammersmen are at hand with their tongs and hammers,

      What always served and always serves is at hand.

      Than this nothing has better served, it has served all,

      Served the fluent-tongued and subtle-sensed Greek, and long ere the Greek,

      Served in building the buildings that last longer than any,

      Served the Hebrew, the Persian, the most ancient Hindustanee,

      Served the mound-raiser on the Mississippi, served those whose relics remain in Central America,

      Served Albic temples in woods or on plains, with unhewn pillars and the druids,

      Served the artificial clefts, vast, high, silent, on the snow-cover’d hills of Scandinavia,

      Served those who time out of mind made on the granite walls rough sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships, ocean waves,

      Served the paths of the irruptions of the Goths, served the pastoral tribes and nomads,

      Served the long distant Kelt, served the hardy pirates of the Baltic,

      Served before any of those the venerable and harmless men of Ethiopia,

      Served the making of helms for the galleys of pleasure and the making of those for war,

      Served all great works on land and all great works on the sea,

      For the mediaeval

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