The Torch-Bearer

by Edith Wharton

　　That held their glories moulders in its turn.

　　Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed,

　　And ever on the palimpsest of earth

　　Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ.

　　But one thing makes the years its pedestal,

　　Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps

　　A skyward wing above its epitaph--

　　The will of man willing immortal things.

　　The ages are but baubles hung upon

　　The thread of some strong lives--and one slight wrist

　　May lift a century above the dust;

　　For Time,

　　The Sisyphean load of little lives,

　　Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great.

　　But who are these that, linking hand in hand,

　　Transmit across the twilight waste of years

　　The flying brightness of a kindled hour?

　　Not always, nor alone, the lives that search

　　How they may snatch a glory out of heaven

　　Or add a height to Babel; oftener they

　　That in the still fulfilment of each day's

　　Pacific order hold great deeds in leash,

　　That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks

　　Hide the attempered blade of high emprise,

　　And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.

　　So greatly gave he, nurturing 'gainst the call

　　Of one rare moment all the daily store

　　Of joy distilled from the acquitted task,

　　And that deliberate rashness which bespeaks

　　The pondered action passed into the blood;

　　So swift to harden purpose into deed

　　That, with the wind of ruin in his hair,

　　Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh,

　　And at one stroke he lived the whole of life,

　　Poured all in one libation to the truth,

　　A brimming flood whose drops shall overflow

　　On deserts of the soul long beaten down

　　By the brute hoof of habit, till they spring

　　In manifold upheaval to the sun.

　　Call here no high artificer to raise

　　His wordy monument--such lives as these

　　Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp

　　An empty vesture. Let resounding lives

　　Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaults

　　And make the grave their spokesman--such as he

　　Are as the hidden streams that, underground,

　　Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine,

　　Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars

　　The scent of freedom; or a light that burns

　　Immutably across the shaken seas,

　　Forevermore by nameless hands renewed,

　　Where else were darkness and a glutted shore.