Humanity's Stream.
by Alfred Castner King

I stood upon a crowded thoroughfare,
Within a city's confines, where were met
All classes and conditions, and surveyed,
From a secluded niche or aperture,
The various, ever-changing multitude
Which passed along in restless turbulence,
And, as a human river, ebbed and flowed
Within its banks of brick and masonry.
Within this vast and heterogeneous throng,
One might discern all stages and degrees,
From wealth and power to helpless indigence;
Extravagance to trenchant penury,
And all extremes of want and misery.
Some blest by wealth, some cursed by poverty;
Some in positions neutral to them both;
Some wore a gaunt and ill-conditioned look
Which told its tale of lack of nourishment;
While others showed that irritated air
Which speaks of gout and pampered appetite;
Some following vocations quite reverse
From those which nature had endowed them for;
Some passed with face self-satisfied and calm,
As if the world bore nothing else but joy;
And some there were who, from the cradle's mouth,
As they pursued their journey to the grave,
Had felt no throb save that of misery;
The man of large affairs passed by in haste,
With mind preoccupied, nor thought of else
Save undertakings which concerned himself;
The shallow son of misplaced opulence
Came strutting by with self-important air,
With head erect in a contemptuous poise,
As if the stars were subject to his will,
And e'en the golden sun was something base,
Which had offended with its wholesome light
In shining on so great a personage,
A being more than ordinary clay,
And much superior to the vulgar herd!
Some faces passed which knew no kindly look,
And felt no friendly pressure of the hand;
And if the face depict the character,
Some passed so steeped in crime and villainy
That Judas' vile, ill-favored countenance
Would seem in contrast quite respectable;
Some features glowed with unfeigned honesty,
Some grimaced in dissimulating craft,
Some smiled benignantly and passed along;
Some faces meek, some stern and resolute;
Some the embodiment of gentleness;
Some whose specific aspects plainly told
Their fondest dreams were not of earth, but heaven;
A newly wedded couple passed that way,
In the sweet zenith of their honeymoon,
But little dreaming what the future held.
The light and trivial fool, the brainless fop;
The staid and sober priest and minister;
And she who worshiped at proud fashion's shrine;
The mental giant, serious and sad;
The thoughtful student and philosopher;
And some of intellect diminutive;
The man of letters, with abstracted mien,
And he whose every thought was on the toil
Which made his bare existence possible;
The blushing maiden, pure and innocent;
The stately grandam, dignified and gray;
The matron, with the babe upon her breast;
The silly superannuated flirt,
Who nursed her waning beauty day by day,
And still essayed to act the role of youth;
The gay coquette and belle of other days,
Who in life's morning, with disdainful laugh,
Had quaffed the cup of pleasure to its dregs,
And now, grown old, must pay the penalty
In wrinkles and uncourted loneliness;
The widow, who, but newly desolate,
Would grasp a hand, then start to find it gone;
The spendthrift and the sordid usurer,
Who knew no sentiment save lust for gold;
The bloated drunkard, sinking 'neath the weight
Of wassail inclination dissolute;
The youth, who, following his baleful steps,
Reeled for the first time from intemperance;
And she who had forgot her covenant,
In brazen infamy and unwept shame;--
The good, the bad, the impious and unjust,
The energetic and the indolent,
The adolescent and the venerable,
Passed by, pursuant of their various ways.
*        *        *        *        *
The aged and decrepit plodded by,
Whom one would think were ripe for any tomb,
Yet quailed at dissolution's very thought;
The crippled and deformed, with cane and crutch,
Came limping by, as eddies in the stream;
The mendicant, whose eyes might never see
The golden sunlight, felt his way along,
And though the world was dark, still shrank from death.
Some faces showed the trace of recent tears,
And some revealed the impress of despair;
Others endeavored with a careless smile
To hide a breast surcharged with hopelessness,
As one afflicted with a foul disease
Strives to avoid the scrutinizing gaze
By the assumption of indifference;
Some whose misfortunes and adversities
And oft repeated disappointments, dried
The fountain heads of kindness, and had turned
Life's sweetest joys to gall and bitterness.
Each face betrayed some sort or form of woe;
In more than one I read a tragedy.
*        *        *        *        *
How complex is existence! What a maze
Of complication and entanglement!
Each thread combining with the other threads
Fulfills its office in the labyrinth;
Each link concatenates the other links
Which constitute the vast and endless chain
Of human life, and human destiny,--
The strange phantasmagoria of fate.
*        *        *        *        *
So we, in life's procession, pass along
To the accompaniment of secret dirge,
Or laughter interspersed with tear and groan;
Nor pause a moment, nor retrace a step,
But march in Fate's spectacular review
In pageant to our common goal--
The Grave.