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Why should we look one common faith to find,
Where one in every score is color-blind?
If here on earth they know not red from green,
Will they see better into things unseen!
Once more to time’s old graveyard I return
And scrape the moss from memory’s pictured urn.
Who, in these days when all things go by steam,
Recalls the stage-coach with its four-horse team?
Its sturdy driver,–who remembers him?
Or the old landlord, saturnine and grim,
Who left our hill-top for a new abode
And reared his sign-post farther down the road?
Still in the waters of the dark Shawshine
Do the young bathers splash and think they’re clean?
Do pilgrims find their way to Indian Ridge,
Or journey onward to the far-off bridge,
And bring to younger ears the story back
Of the broad stream, the mighty Merrimac?
Are there still truant feet that stray beyond
These circling bounds to Pomp’s or Haggett’s Pond,
Or where the legendary name recalls
The forest’s earlier tenant,–“Deerjump Falls”?
Yes, every nook these youthful feet explore,
Just as our sires and grand sires did of yore;
So all life’s opening paths, where nature led
Their father’s feet, the children’s children tread.
Roll the round century’s fivescore years away,
Call from our storied past that earliest day
When great Eliphalet (I can see him now,–
Big name, big frame, big voice, and beetling brow),
Then young Eliphalet,–ruled the rows of boys
In homespun gray or old-world corduroys,–
And save for fashion’s whims, the benches show
The self-same youths, the very boys we know.
Time works strange marvels: since I trod the green
And swung the gates, what wonders I have seen!
But come what will,–the sky itself may fall,–
As things of course the boy accepts them all.
The prophet’s chariot, drawn by steeds of flame,
For daily use our travelling millions claim;
The face we love a sunbeam makes our own;
No more the surgeon hears the sufferer’s groan;
What unwrit histories wrapped in darkness lay
Till shovelling Schliemann bared them to the day!
Your Richelieu says, and says it well, my lord,
The pen is (sometimes) mightier than the sword;
Great is the goosequill, say we all; Amen!
Sometimes the spade is mightier than the pen;
It shows where Babel’s terraced walls were raised,
The slabs that cracked when Nimrod’s palace blazed,
Unearths Mycenee, rediscovers Troy,–
Calmly he listens, that immortal boy.
A new Prometheus tips our wands with fire,
A mightier Orpheus strains the whispering wire,
Whose lightning thrills the lazy winds outrun
And hold the hours as Joshua stayed the sun,–
So swift, in truth, we hardly find a place
For those dim fictions known as time and space.
Still a new miracle each year supplies,–
See at his work the chemist of the skies,
Who questions Sirius in his tortured rays
And steals the secret of the solar blaze;
Hush! while the window-rattling bugles play
The nation’s airs a hundred miles away!
That wicked phonograph! hark! how it swears!
Turn it again and make it say its prayers!
And was it true, then, what the story said
Of Oxford’s friar and his brazen head?
While wondering Science stands, herself perplexed
At each day’s miracle, and asks “What next?”
The immortal boy, the coming heir of all,
Springs from his desk to “urge the flying ball,”
Cleaves with his bending oar the glassy waves,
With sinewy arm the dashing current braves,
The same bright creature in these haunts of ours
That Eton shadowed with her “antique towers.”