Towards democracy, стр. 99

Towards Democracy 85

LIV

Where you sit in your armchair by the hearth, sleeping long and long; where you wake to look back upon your life lying hushed below you—like one who looks back from the summit of a mountain ;

And the children that came to you in the moming have gone from you at evening dusk,

And the lesson of unfulfilled longing is yours, and of the inflow of immortality ;

Where they go out over the earth, where the children of the universal mother go; and the wind carries them over the sea, blowing them into all lands; where they flow through the straits and narrows and over the great oceans of the earth, dwelling for nights together among the white leaping crests under the stars;

Where strange faces meet, under other-slanting suns, amid new scenes and colors ;

Where light encounters dark, and in their meeting glance lie new social ideals and civilisations slumbering ;

Where the mother of them all sits dreaming ;

Where the young poet peers in by moonlight through the bars of the tomb of Dante, and tums away with a silent prayer ;

Where the artist with easel and palette sits swathed in coats upon a hillside watching the untroubled dawn;

Where the old Hindu feeling the approach of death leaves his family and retires to a hut in the jungle, there to spend his last days in prayer and solitude ;