Great is the worth of such heroic souls:
Amid the strenuous turmoil of their deeds,
They clearly speak of something that controls
The higher breeds of men by higher needs
Than bees, content with honey in their hives!
Ah, not enough the narrow lives
On profitable toil intent!
And not enough the guerdons of success
Garnered in homes of affluent selfishness!
A noble discontent
Cries for a wider scope
To use the wider wings of human hope;
A vision of the common good
Opens the prison-door of solitude;
And, once beyond the wall,
Breathing the ampler air,
The heart becomes aware
_That life without a country is not life at all._
A country worthy of a freeman's love;
A country worthy of a good man's prayer;
A country strong, and just, and brave, and fair,--
A woman's form of beauty throned above
The shrine where noble aspirations meet--
To live for her is great, to die is sweet!
Heirs of the rugged pioneers
Who dreamed this dream and made it true,
Remember that they dreamed for you.
They did not fear their fate
In those tempestuous years,
But put their trust in God, and with keen eyes,
Trained in the open air for looking far,
They saw the many-million-acred land
Won from the desert by their hand,
Swiftly among the nations rise,--
Texas a sovereign State,
And on her brow a star!
III
THE CONSTELLATION
How strange that the nature of light is a thing beyond our ken,
And the flame of the tiniest candle flows from a fountain sealed!
How strange that the meaning of life, in the little lives of men,
So often baffles our search with a mystery unrevealed!
But the larger life of man, as it moves in its secular sweep,
Is the working out of a Sovereign Will whose ways appear;
And the course of the journeying stars on the dark blue boundless deep,
Is the place where our science rests in the reign of law most clear.
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