Jephthah and Other Mysteries

x DEDICATION. Lift up thy voice, breathe fury on her foes, Smite bigots yet again, and call on Reason, Reason that must awake, and sternly grip The unhooded serpent of dictatorship! Or, if thou have laid aside the starry brand, And scourge, whose knots with their foul blood are rotten Whom thou didst smite; if thine unweary hand Sicken of slaughter; if thy soul have gotten Its throne in so sublime a fatherland, Above these miscreants and misbegotten ; If even already thy spirit have found peace, Among the thronged immortal secrecies ; If with the soul of Aéschylus thy soul Talk, and with Sappho’s if thy music mingle; If with the spirit infinite and whole Of Shakespeare thou commune; if thy brows tingle With Dante's kiss; if Milton’s thunders roll Amid thy skies; if thou, supreme and single, Be made as Shelley or as Hugo now, And all their laurels mingle on thy brow— Then (as Elijah, when the whirling fire Caught him) stoop not thy spiritual splendour, And sacred-seeking eyes to our desire, But mould one memory yet, divinely tender, Of earth, and leave thy mantle, and thy lyre, A double portion of thy spirit to render, That yet the banner may fling out on high, And yet the lyre teach freemen how to die!