THE STRIPE OF PROGRESS.
By J. G. Whittier
In the war which truth or freedom wages
With impious fraud and the wrong of ages,
Hate and malice, and self-love mar
The notes of triumph with painful jar,
And the helping angels turn aside
Their sorrowing faces the shame to hide.
Never on custom's oiled grooves
The world to a higher level moves,
But grates and grinds with friction hard
On granite boulder and flinty shard.
The heart must bleed before it feels,
The pool be troubled before it heals:
Ever by losses the right must gain,
Every good have its birth of pain;
The active virtues blush to find
The vices wearing their badge behind,
And graces and charities feel the fire
Wherein the sins of the age expire:
The fiend still rends, as of old he rent,
The tortured body from which he went. But time tests all. In the over-drift
And flow of the Nile, with its annual gift,
Who cares for the Hadji's relics sunk?
Who thinks of the drowned-out Coptic monk?
The tide that loosens the temple's stones,
And scatters the sacred ibis-bones,
Drives away from the valley-land
That Arab robber, the wandering sand,
Moistens the fields that know no rain,
Fringes the desert with belts of grain,
And bread to the sower brings again. So the flood of emotion deep and strong
Troubled the land as it swept along,
But left a result of holier lives,
Tenderer mothers and worthier wives.
The husband and father whose children fled,
And sad wife wept when his drunken tread
Frightened peace from his roof-tree's shade,
And a rock of offense of his heart-stone made,
In a strength that was not his own began
To rise from the brute's to the plane of man.
Old friends embraced, long held apart
By evil counsel and pride of heart:
And penitence saw, through misty tears,
In the bow of hope on its cloud of fears
The promise of Heaven's eternal years,—
The peace of God for the world's annoy,—
Beauty for ashes, and oil of joy.
—J. G. Whittier.