Page:The Statues in the Block and Other Poems (1881).djvu/108

Ah, pity them, God! they must always choose,
For the life to gain and the death to lose.
They dream of the woods and the mountain spring,
And they grasp the flower, to clutch the sting.

Even so: they are better than those who bend
Like beasts to the lash, and go on to the end
As a beast will go, with to-day for a life,
And to-morrow a blank. Offer peace and strife
To a man enslaved—let him vote for ease
And coward labor, and be content;
Or let him go out in the front, as these,
With their eyes on the doom and the danger, went.
And take your choice—the man who remains
A self-willed serf, or the one who stains
His sudden hand with a drive for light
Through a bristling rank and a gloomy night.
This man for me—for his heart he'll share
With a friend: with a foe, he'll fight him fair.