I dreamed I was a sculptor, and had wrought <br />Out of a towering adamantine crag <br />A mighty figure, stately, giant-limbed, <br />And with the face of a Homeric god. <br />Planted aloft upon the levelled cone <br />Of a vast tumulus, that seemed to swell <br />Above the sinking outline of the view <br />As up from the dusk past, firm fixed it stood, <br />Full in the face of the resplendent morn <br />Against the deep of heaven all flecked with clouds; <br />And I methought was glorying in my work <br />One large arm lay upon the powerful breast, <br />The other held a scroll. The ample head, <br />Majestic in its dome-like curvatures, <br />Looked heedful out with full expectant eyes <br />Over the brightening world, and in the lines <br />And gracious curves of nostrils and of lips <br />You traced the use of smiles. But on the brows <br />There pained a weight and weariness of thought, <br />And furrows spake of care. Much, too, of doubt <br />Shadowed the meaning of the mighty face; <br />Much was there also in its cast, that seemed <br />Significant of a striving to believe, <br />To be the liege of an ancestral faith <br />In things remote, unsecular, more the birth <br />Of mystic than sciential lore, and thence <br />But half assured itself. <br /> Such was my work: <br />A formal type, though dream-designed, it seemed <br />Of that great ultimate of manhood, which <br />By daring, hoping, doing, and enduring, <br />Doubting, divining,—still from age to age <br />Doth mould the world, and lead it truthward on, <br />Even through its seers, its heroes, and its kings: <br />For all who saw it were constrained, methought, <br />To sigh, as they looked up—“Humanity.” <br /> <br /> <br /><br /><br />Charles Harpur<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/humanity-2/
