Though for your sake I would not have you now 
So near to me tonight as now you are, 
God knows how much a stranger to my heart 
Was any cold word that I may have written; 
And you, poor woman that I made my wife,
You have had more of loneliness, I fear, 
Than I?though I have been the most alone, 
Even when the most attended. So it was 
God set the mark of his inscrutable 
Necessity on one that was to grope,
And serve, and suffer, and withal be glad 
For what was his, and is, and is to be, 
When his old bones, that are a burden now, 
Are saying what the man who carried them 
Had not the power to say. Bones in a grave,
Cover them as they will with choking earth, 
May shout the truth to men who put them there, 
More than all orators. And so, my dear, 
Since you have cheated wisdom for the sake 
Of sorrow, let your sorrow be for you,
This last of nights before the last of days, 
The lying ghost of what there is of me 
That is the most alive. There is no death 
For me in what they do. Their death it is 
They should heed most when the sun comes again
To make them solemn. There are some I know 
Whose eyes will hardly see their occupation, 
For tears in them?and all for one old man; 
For some of them will pity this old man, 
Who took upon himself the work of God
Because he pitied millions. That will be 
For them, I fancy, their compassionate 
Best way of saying what is best in them 
To say; for they can say no more than that, 
And they can do no more than what the dawn
Of one more day shall give them light enough 
To do. But there are many days to be, 
And there are many men to give their blood, 
As I gave mine for them. May they come soon! 

May they come soon, I say. And when they come,
May all that I have said unheard be heard, 
Proving at last, or maybe not?no matter? 
What sort of madness was the part of me 
That made me strike, whether I found the mark 
Or missed it. Meanwhile, I?ve a strange content,
A patience, and a vast indifference 
To what men say of me and what men fear 
To say. There was a work to be begun, 
And when the Voice, that I have heard so long, 
Announced as in a thousand silences
An end of preparation, I began 
The coming work of death which is to be, 
That life may be. There is no other way 
Than the old way of war for a new land 
That will not know itself and is tonight
A stranger to itself, and to the world 
A more prodigious upstart among states 
Than I was among men, and so shall be 
Till they are told and told, and told again; 
For men are children, waiting to be told,
And most of them are children all their lives. 
The good God in his wisdom had them so, 
That now and then a madman or a seer 
May shake them out of their complacency 
And shame them into deeds. The major file
See only what their fathers may have seen, 
Or may have said they saw when they saw nothing. 
I do not say it matters what they saw. 
Now and again to some lone soul or other 
God speaks, and there is hanging to be done,?
As once there was a burning of our bodies 
Alive, albeit our souls were sorry fuel. 
But now the fires are few, and we are poised 
Accordingly, for the state?s benefit, 
A few still minutes between heaven and earth.
The purpose is, when they have seen enough 
Of what it is that they are not to see, 
To pluck me as an unripe fruit of treason, 
And then to fling me back to the same earth 
Of which they are, as I suppose, the flower?
Not given to know the riper fruit that waits 
For a more comprehensive harvesting. 

Yes, may they come, and soon. Again I say, 
May they come soon!?before too many of them 
Shall be the bloody cost of our defection.
When hell waits on the dawn of a new state, 
Better it were that hell should not wait long,? 
Or so it is I see it who should see 
As far or farther into time tonight 
Than they who talk and tremble for me now,
Or wish me to those everlasting fires 
That are for me no fear. Too many fires 
Have sought me out and seared me to the bone? 
Thereby, for all I know, to temper me 
For what was mine to do. If I did ill
What I did well, let men say I was mad; 
Or let my name for ever be a question 
That will not sleep in history. What men say 
I was will cool no cannon, dull no sword, 
Invalidate no truth. Meanwhile, I was;
And the long train is lighted that shall burn, 
Though floods of wrath may drench it, and hot feet 
May stamp it for a slight time into smoke 
That shall blaze up again with growing speed, 
Until at last a fiery crash will come
To cleanse and shake a wounded hemisphere, 
And heal it of a long malignity 
That angry time discredits and disowns. 

Tonight there are men saying many things; 
And some who see life in the