[.ART.] The Artists

We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers
On whom the pale moon gleams.
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful, deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory.
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Can go forth and conquer a crown,
But three with a new song's measure
Can trample his empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the burried past of the earth
Built Nineveh with our singing
And Babel itself with our mirth.
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
For the old and the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying
Or one that it coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wonderous thing of our dreaming--
Unearthly, impossible seeming--
The soldier, the king and the peasant
Are working together as one,
'Till our dream shall become their present
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they were raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they were going.
But on one man's soul it hath broken:
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man's heart.

And therefore today is thrilling
With a past day's late fulfilling.
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted;
And, scorning the dream of tomorrow,
They are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing--
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!--
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls, with high music ringing:
O men, it must ever be
The we dwell in our dreaming and singing
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning,
Intrepid you hear us cry;
How, in spite of your human scorning,
Once more the future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great Hail! We cry to the comers
From the dazzling, unknown shore,
Bring us hither your sun and your summers
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song's new numbers
And things that we dreampt not before.
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers
And a singer who sings no more.