POETRY.

THE HYMN OF (ANCIENT) MAN.

A SONG AFTER SUNSET.

Have ye known me at last for your father, 0 children of bimanows brood ?

Come turn and be dutiful rather than foster your pride with. strange food.

Can ye search out your lineage and span it, or tell the beginning of life In the fire-new first breath of the planet, the stir of the worlds and the strife ?

From the day-spring of chaos most holy, the comical passion of storms, The sense of the creature woke slowly through flaccid invertebrate forms : Boneless and eyeless they wallowed in depths of unsearchable seas ; Blindly they caught or were swallowed, half-sentient of craving and ease : Until in the day's high meridian, the hour of the fulness of time, Came forth.the elect, the Ascidian, from the conflict of sea and of slime ; And defying fate's malice that mocks us there swam on the waters in power A lord of new life, Amphioxus, full blossom of vertebrate flower. So scorning the creatures that lack bone and know not before from behind, They waxed in the strength of their backbone, each reptile and fish in his kind : Their sons longed for heaven's clear heat, and the sun-litten sky's free fire, They trod firm ground with their feet, fulfilled of their heart's desire ; They cast off their trapping of gills, and were nourished with bountiful air, And some were made feathery with quills, and some were made shaggy with hair : The beast grew mighty on earth in four-footed lordship of things, And in air was a noise of mirth and thunder of resonant wings. In due season I also arose, with fur and a flexible tail, And ears pointed, as Darwin well shows, I whose children are man and prevail.

Ah for my offspring, full weak of their hands, with long words in their mouth !

Northward and southward they seek after darkness and hunger and drouth.

Ah for my crown of primeval delight, when a tropical soil Luxuriant and warm from upheaval bore sustenance stainless of toil !

My days for the morrow were careless, the ways of my going were plain : Ye have made yourselves tailless and hairless, and multiplied folds to your brain.

You gather and heap yourselves treasure, to fear for the moth and the rust ; You have meted the world with your measure, to know yourselves water and dust : You live in a clatter and scrimmage of chaffering and cheating and trade ; Ye have made yourselves gods in your image, and quail at the gods ye have made.

Stitch after stitch ye go back to sew garments and make yourselves mad : I was happier with fur to my back when clothing was none to be had.

My palace was built in the frondage that swung to the breezes of spring : I sold not may soul into bondage to prophet or preacher or king.

I knew not the path of your reasons, to sunder the thing from the thought, But I laughed in the light of the seasons, the joys that the summer- time brought.

Though you search out the will of the wind and the conscience of consonant spheres, Have you skill to recover and find the sense that was quick in mine ears?

Your arts and your music, I grant, were unknown at the Catarhine date ; But where is the charm of the chant that I sang in the trees to my mate ?

To your food you take fire and strange tools, you men of all creatures alone —

Alas the faint-hearted and fools, did they never crack nuts with a stone?

You gape at your kindred in cages with most insupportable airs, And dream that by process of ages your wisdom is greater than theirs.

The secrets of stars in their courses, the weight of the suns in your scale, Their systems and orbits and forces—you may have them for aught they avail.

You may tell which is quickest and slowest, why one thing and all things are thus :

Yet Man is of all things the lowest—for Man is a Civilized Cuss.: New York, 1871.