Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

George Willis Cooke, comp. The Poets of Transcendentalism: An Anthology. 1903.

Our Birthright

George Shepard Burleigh (1821–1903)

AS children of the Infinite Soul

Our Birthright is the boundless whole,

Won truth by truth while endless ages roll.

Swift Fancy’s wing would flag in flight

To reach the depth, the breadth, and height

Of the vast wealth that waits our growing sight:

High truths which have not yet been dreamed,

Realities of all that seemed

Best in the best of what we hoped and deemed:

Such freedom under natural law

As not the fabled Eden saw,

So large and calm, and full of blissful awe:

And love that cannot fail to flow,

Warm as the sun and white as snow,

Through flesh and soul that sweet as lilies grow:

With knowledge that on sea and land

And air shall lay familiar hand,

And weigh the star-dust on creation’s strand;

And wisdom ever more divine,

Of clustered knowledge the red wine,

Which holds the world dissolved and crystalline.

Peace over all in skyey calm

Shall weave her olive with the palm

Of victory, and steep the earth in balm.

A thousand years the soul shall climb

To guess what more of wealth sublime

Waits for a conqueror in the depths of time.

The fiends who guard it, hunger-gnawed,

Are Doubt and Fear and ancient Fraud,

And grey old Use by whom the world is awed.

But heralds of the better day

Beckon us on, and point the way,

Where earnest seeking never goes astray.

No peril daunts the Brave; he speeds

Across the wreck of older creeds,

And crownless gods cast down among the weeds.

Doubt dies beneath his lifted spear,

Fraud slinks away with breathless Fear,

And grey old Use shrieks in his heedless ear.

Wide gape these parasites aghast

As in the temples of the Past

He sets the ark of living Godhood fast;

And hollow gods, to whom they pledge

Libations on their altar-ledge,

Fall shattered down to bite the grunsel’s edge.

Well may ye deem that pain and loss

Will haunt his walks, and murder toss

On him the boding shadow of her cross.

But loss and pain will wear away

The thick opacity of clay,

And the cross lift him to the zone of day!

Far-seeking his imperial goal,

No fate can rob the earnest soul

Of his great birthright in the boundless whole!