It takes a long time to bring a thought into act And when it blossoms at last, the gardeners wonder⁠— There have been so many to labor this patch of ground, Garrison, Beecher, a dozen New England names, Courageous, insulting Sumner, narrow and strong, With his tongue of silver and venom and his wrecked body, Wendell Phillips, Antinous of Harvard⁠— But now that the thought has arisen, they are not sure It was their thought after all⁠—it is good enough⁠— The best one could expect from a man like Lincoln, But this and that are wrong, are unshrewdly planned, We could have ordered it better, we knew the ground, It should have been done before, in a different way, And our praise is grudging. Pity the gardeners, Pity Boston, pity the pure in heart, Pity the men whom Time goes past in the night, Without their knowledge. They worked through the heat of the day.