III
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aid the Watcher by the WayTo the slower folk who stumbled,To the weak and the world-humbled,“Tell me how you fare to-day.Some with ardor shaken,All with honor scarred,Do you falter, finding hardThe far chance that you have taken? “Or, do you at length awakenTo an antic retribution,Goading to a new confusionThe drugged hopes of yesterday?O you poor mad men that hobble,Will you not return, or stay?Do you trust, you broken people,To a dawn without the day?” “You speak well of what you know not,”Muttered one; and then a second:“You have begged and you have beckoned,But you see us on our way.Who are you to scold us,Knowing what we know?Jeremiah, long ago,Said as much as you have told us. “As we are, then, you behold us:Derelicts of all conditions,Poets, rogues, and sick physicians,Plodding forward from afar;Forward now into the darknessWhere the men before us are;Forward, onward, out of grayness,To the light that shone so far.”
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