She interceded: “How impatient, how unkind

You are! What secret do you know

To keep you young?

Age comes with keen and accurate advance

Against youth’s lightly handled lance.

Age is an ancient despot that has wrung

All hearts.”... My answer was the song forever sung:

“This that I need to know I know—

Onpouring and perpetual immigrants,

We join a fellowship beyond America

Yet in America....

Beyond the touch of age, my Celia,

In you, in me, in everyone, we join God’s growing mind.

For in no separate place or time, or soul, we find

Our meaning. In one mingled soul reside

All times and places. On a tide

Of mist and azure air

We journey toward that soul, through circumstance,

Until at last we fully care and dare

To make within ourselves divinity.”

“And what of all the others,” Celia said,

“Who ventured brave as you? What of the dead?”

Again I saw the halo in her hair

And said: “The dead sail forward, hid behind

This wave that we ourselves must mount to find

The eternal way.

Adventurers of long ago

Seeking a richer gain than earthy gold,

They have left for us, half-told,

Their guesses of the port, more numerous and blind

Than their unnumbered and forgotten faces.

... And though today, as then,

Death is a wind blowing them forward out of sight and out of mind,

Yet in familiar and in unfamiliar places

Inquiring by what means I may

The destination of the wind

Of death, I have found signs and traces

Of the way they go

And with a quicker heart I have beheld again

In visions, from my ship at sea,

The great new world confronting me,

Where, yesterday,

Today, tomorrow, dwell my countrymen.”

And then I looked away,

Over the pasture and the valley, to the New Hampshire town....

And my heart’s acclaim went down,

To Florida, Wisconsin, California,

And brought a good report to Celia:

“My ship America,

This whole wide-timbered land,

Well captained and well manned,

Ascends the sea

Of time, carrying me

And many passengers.

And every cabin stirs

With the pulsing of its engine over the sway of time,

Yes, every state and city, every village, every farm,

And every heart and everyone’s right arm.

... Celia, hold out your hand,

Or anyone in any field or street, hold out your hand—

And I can see it pulse the massive climb

And dip

Of this America,

My ship!”

“Why make your ship so small?

Can your America contain them all?”

How wisely I replied

In the province of my pride:

“But these are my own shipmates, these

Who share my ship America with me!

... On many seas

On other ships, even the ancient ships of Greece,

Have other immigrants set sail for peace.

But these are my own shipmates whom I see

At hand—these are my company.”

“What have you said,” she cried,

“Thinking you knew?

Whom have you called your shipmates? You were wrong!

Your ship is strong

With a more various crew

Than any one man’s country could provide,

To make it ride

So high and manifold and so complete.

This is the engine-beat

Of life itself, the ship of ships.

There is no other ship among the stars than this.

The wind of death is a bright kiss

Upon the lips

Of every immigrant, as upon yours and mine—

Theirs is the stinging brine

And sun and open sea,

And theirs the arching sky, eternity.”

And Celia had my homage. I was wrong.

Immigrants all, one ship we ride,

Man and his bride

The journey through.

O let it be with a bridal-song!...

“My shipmates are as many as eternity is long:

The unborn and the living and the dead—

And, Celia, you!”

That midnight when the moon was tall

I walked alone by the white lake—yet with a vanished race

And with a race to come. To walk with dead men is to pray,

To walk with men unborn—to find the way.

I have seen many days. That night I watched them all.

I have seen many a sign and trace

Of beauty and of hope:

An elm at night; an arrowy waterfall;

The illimitable round unbroken scope

Of life; a friend’s unfrightened dying face.

Though I have heard the cry of fear in crowded loneliness of space,

Dead laughter from the lips of lust,

Anger from fools, falsehood from sycophants,

(My fear, my lips, my anger, my disgrace)

Though I have held a golden cup and tasted rust,

Seen cities rush to be defiled

By the bright-fevered and consuming sin

Of making only coin and lives to count it in,

Yet once I watched with Celia,

Watched on a ferry an Italian child,

One whom America

Had changed.

His cheek was hardy and his mouth was frail

For sweetness, and his eyes were opening wild

As with wonder at an unseen figure carrying a grail.

Perhaps he faced, as I did in his glance,

The spirit of the living dead who, having ranged

Through long reverses, forward without fail

Carry deliverance

From privilege and disinheritance,

Until their universal soul shall prove

The only answer to the ache of love.

“America was wistful in that child,”

Said Celia afterwards—and smiled

Because all three of us were immigrants,

Each voyaging into each.

Over the city-roofs, the sun awoke

Bright in the dew

Of a marvellous morning, while she spoke

Of the sun, the dew, the wonder, in a child:

“He who devises tyranny,” she said,

“Denies the resurrection of the dead,

Beneath his own degree degrades himself,

Invades himself with ugliness and wars.

But he who knows all men to be himself,

Part of his own experiment and reach,

Humbles and amplifies himself

To build and share a tenement of stars.”

Once when we broke a loaf of bread

And shared the honey, Celia said:

“To share all beauty as the interchanging dust,

To be akin and kind and to entrust

All men to one another for their good,

Is to have heard and understood,

And carried to the common enemy

In you and me,

The ultimatum of democracy.”

“But to what goal?” I wondered. And I heard her happy speech:

“It is my faith that God is our own dream

Of perfect understanding of the soul.

It is my