230 INTRODUCTION
with Emerson — " If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God ; the safety of God, the immortahty of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice," — Randall completely identifies the moral and the religious sentirnents on the warrant of "the understanding." He thereby makes himself the loftiest and truest exponent of ethical religion in our time. Nay, more : unless from the literature of the past there can be produced a poem which in terrible truthfulness to experience and in ethical gran- deur of conception and in poetic fire shall be at least an equal to the " Ode to Conscience," I see not how to with- hold from Randall the laurel which is due to the most inspired bard of the Moral Law. Two whole centuries of New England Puritanism, filtered through the soul of Samuel Adams, transmitted to the soul of his descendant, and there etherealized in the fierce heat and light of modern thought, are needed to account for the unsurpassed sublimity of moral imagination in this closing apostrophe to Conscience : —
" Thou reignest in heaven, the archangels worship thee, Twin child with Love, first-born of Deity ! No seraph from thy face so far can fly But thou dost fix and hold him with thine eye, Wilt find him out in the most secret place — Where'er he turns, he must behold thy face. Thou art o'er all, in all, throughout all Time and Space ; And, if this earth and the sweet light of day E'er in chaotic darkness melt away. Thy deep low voice, 'mongst the celestial spheres, Will still sound on throughout the unending years. There wilt thou dwell the immortal hosts among. Uttering thy runes severe in deathless song, Falsehood from truth unravelling, right from wrong."
F. E. A.
Cambridge, Mass., June i, 1898.
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