'What should we do in that small colony Of pinched fanatics, who would rather choose Freedom to clip an inch more from their hair, Than the great chance of setting England free? Not there, amid the stormy wilderness, 180 Should we learn wisdom; or if learned, what room To put it into act,--else worse than naught? We learn our souls more, tossing for an hour Upon this huge and ever-vexed sea Of human thought, where kingdoms go to wreck Like fragile bubbles yonder in the stream, Than in a cycle of New England sloth, Broke only by a petty Indian war, Or quarrel for a letter more or less In some hard word, which, spelt in either way, 190 Not their most learned clerks can understand. New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and in time outgrows The laws that in our fathers' day were best; And, doubtless, after us, some purer scheme Will be shaped out by wiser men than we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth. We cannot hale Utopia on by force; But better, almost, be at work in sin, Than in a brute inaction browse and sleep. 200 No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him; there is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil! The busy world stoves angrily aside The man who stands with arms akimbo set, Until occasion tells him what to do; And he who waits to have his task marked out Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled. Our time is one that calls for earnest deeds; 210 Season and Government, like two broad seas, Yearn for each other with outstretched arms Across this narrow isthmus of the throne, And roll their white surf higher every day. One age moves onward, and the next builds up Cities and gorgeous palaces, where stood The rude log-huts of those who tamed the wild, Rearing from out the forests they had felled The goodly framework of a fairer state; The builder's trowel and the settler's axe 220 Are seldom wielded by the selfsame hand; Ours is the harder task, yet not the less Shall we receive the blessing for our toil From the choice spirits of the aftertime. My soul is not a palace of the past, Where outworn creeds, like Rome's gray senate, quake, Hearing afar the Vandal's trumpet hoarse, That shakes old systems with a thunder-fit. That time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change; Then let it come: I have no dread of what 230 Is called for by the instinct of mankind; Nor think I that God's world will fall apart Because we tear a parchment more or less. Truth Is eternal, but her effluence, With endless change, is fitted to the hour; Her mirror is turned forward to reflect The promise of the future, not the past. He who would win the name of truly great Must understand his own age and the next, And make the present ready to fulfil 240 Its prophecy, and with the future merge Gently and peacefully, as wave with wave. The future works out great men's purposes; The present is enough, for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay, wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever; better those Who lead the blind old giant by the hand From out the pathless desert where he gropes, And set him onward in his darksome way, 250 I do not fear to follow out the truth, Albeit along the precipice's edge. Let us speak plain: there is more force in names Than most men dream of; and a lie may keep Its throne a whole age longer, if it skulk Behind the shield of some fair-seeming name. Let us call tyrants _tyrants_, and maintain That only freedom comes by grace of God, And all that comes not by his grace must fail; For men in earnest have no time to waste 260 In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.