Be calm, my heart, and patiently await God's judgment. Oblivious night
wears on, the morning of reckoning nears, I hear the thundering roar of its
chariot. Woman, bow your head down to the dust! and as a sacrifice fling
your heart under those wheels! Darkness will shroud the sky, earth will
tremble, wailing will rend the air and then comes the silent and cruel
end,--that terrible peace, that great forgetting, and awful extinction of
hatred--the supreme deliverance rising from the fire of death.



33


Fiercely they rend in pieces the carpet woven during ages of prayer for the
welcome of the world's best hope.

The great preparations of love lie a heap of shreds, and there is nothing
on the ruined altar to remind the mad crowd that their god was to have
come. In a fury of passion they seem to have burnt their future to cinders,
and with it the season of their bloom.

The air is harsh with the cry, "Victory to the Brute!" The children look
haggard and aged; they whisper to one another that time revolves but never
advances, that we are goaded to run but have nothing to reach, that
creation is like a blind man's groping.

I said to myself, "Cease thy singing. Song is for one who is to come, the
struggle without an end is for things that are."

The road, that ever lies along like some one with ear to the ground