Before the first new dust of dream G.o.d took For making man and hope and love and graves Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints, The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuff That wove the worlds, Before the Hand had stirred that touched them, While still, hinged on nothing, Dim and shapeless Things And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings Floated and waited.
Before the winds had breathed the breath of life Or blown from wastes of s.p.a.ce To Earth"s creating place, The souls of seeds And ghosts of old dead stars, The Lightning Spirit willed Their feet with wonder should be thrilled.
--Primal fire of all desire That leaps from men to men, Brother of Suns And all the Glorious Ones That circle skies, He flashed to these The night that brought the birth, The vision of the place And raised his awful face To all their glittering crowds, And cried from where It lay --A tiny ball of fire and clay In swaddling clothes of clouds, "Behold the Earth!"
Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains!
Looser of the locked and l.u.s.ty winds from their misty caves.
Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors twixt heaven And heaven and Heaven"s heaven. Oh thou whose play Men make to do their work (_Why do their work?_) --And call from holidays of s.p.a.ce, sojourns Of suns and moons, and lock to earth (_Why lock to earth?_)
That the Dead Face may flash across the seas The cry of the new-born babe be heard around A world. Ah me! and the click of l.u.s.t And the madness and the gladness and the ache Of Dust, Dust!
AN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES.
THE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE
The mortal wires of the heart of the earth I sing, melted and fused by men, That the immortal fires of their souls should fling To eaves of heaven and caves of sea, And G.o.d Himself, and farthest hills and dimmest bounds of sense The flame of the Creature"s ken, The flame of the glow of the face of G.o.d Upon the face of men.
Wind-singing wires Along their thousand airy aisles, Feet of birds and songs of leaves, Glimmer of stars and dewy eves.
Sea-singing wires Along their thousand slimy miles, Shadowy deeps, Unsunned steeps, Beating in their awful caves To mouthing fish and bones And weeds unfurled Deserts of waves The heart-beat of this upper world.
Infinite blue, infinite green, Infinite glory of the ear Ticking its pa.s.sions through Infinite fear, Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks The forever untrodden decks Of Death, Ever the seething wires On the floors Of the world, Below the last Locked fast Water-darkened doors Of the sun, Lighting the awful signal fires Of our speechless vast desires On the mountains and the hills Of the sea Till the sandy-buried heights And the sullen sunken vales And fire-defying barrens of the deep The hearth of souls shall be Beacons of Thought, And from the lurk of the shark To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark And where the farthest cloud-sail fills Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping The might and mad delight, The h.e.l.l-and-heaven groping Of our little human wills.
AN ODE TO THE WIRELESS
THE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPH WOULD NOT WORK
Roofed in with fears, Beneath its little strip of sky That is blown about In and out Across my wavering strip of years-- Who am I Whose singing scarce doth reach The cloud-climbed hills, To take upon my lips the speech Of those whose voices Heaven fills With splendor?
And yet-- I cannot quite forget That in the underdawn of dreams I have felt the faint surmise Shining through the starry deep of my sleep That I with G.o.d went singing once Up and down with suns and storms Through the phantom-pillared forms And stately-silent naves And thunder-dreaming caves Of Heaven.
Great Spirit--Thou who in my being"s burning mesh Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh, Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust Hast thrust Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights, Where are the deeds that needs must be, The dreams, the high delights, That I once more may hear my voice From cloudy door to door rejoice-- May stretch the boundaries of love Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears To the faint-remembered glory of those years-- May lift my soul And reach this Heaven of thine With mine?
Where are the gleams?
Thou shalt tell me, Shalt compel me.
The sometime glory shall return I know.
The day shall be When by wondering I shall learn With vapor-fingers to discern The music-hidden keys of skies-- Shall touch like thee Until they answer me The chords of the silent air And strike the wild and slumber-music out Dreaming there.
Above the hills of singing that I know On the trackless, soundless path That wonder hath I shall go, Beyond the street-cry of the poet, The hurdy-gurdy singing Of the throngs, To the Throne of Silence, Where the Doors That guard the farthest faintest sh.o.r.es Of Day Swing their bars, And shut the songs of heaven in From all our dreaming-doing din, Behind the stars.
There, at last, The climbing and the singing pa.s.sed, And the cry, My hushed and listening soul shall lie At the feet of the place Where the Singer sings Who Hides His Face.
VII
THE IDEA OF GREAT MEN
"_I had a vision under a green hedge A hedge of hips and haws--Men yet shall hear Archangels rolling over the high mountains Old Satan"s empty skull._"
As it looks from MOUNT TOM, casting a general glance around, the Earth has about been put into shape, now, to do things.
The Earth has never been seen before looking so trim and convenient--so ready for action--as it is now. Steamships and looms and printing presses and railways have been supplied, wireless telegraph furnishings have lately been arranged throughout, and we have put in speaking tubes on nearly all the continents, and it looks--as seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet were just being finished up, now, for a Great Author.
It is true that art and literature do not have, at first glance, a prosperous look in a machine age, but probably the real trouble the modern world is having with its authors is not because it is a world full of materialism and machinery, but because its authors are the wrong size.
The modern world as it booms along recognizes this, in its practical way, and instead of stopping to speak to its little authors, to its poets crying beside it, and stooping to them and encouraging them, it is quietly and sensibly (as it seems to some of us) going on with its machines and things making preparations for bigger ones.
I have thought the great authors in every age were made by the greatness of the listening to them. The greatest of all, I notice, have felt listened to by G.o.d. Even the lesser ones (who have sometimes been called greatest) have felt listened to, most of them, one finds, by nothing less than nations. The man Jesus gathers kingdoms about Him in His talk, like an infant cla.s.s. It was the way He felt. Almost any one who could have felt himself listened to in this daring way that Jesus did would have managed to say something. He could hardly have missed, one would think, letting fall one or two great ideas at least--ideas that nations would be born for.
It ought not to be altogether without meaning to a modern man that the great prophets and interpreters have talked as a rule to whole nations and that they have talked to them generally, too, for the glory of the whole earth. They could not get their souls geared smaller than a whole earth. Shakspeare feels the generations stretching away like galleries around him listening--when he makes love. It was no particular heroism or patience in the man Columbus that made him sail across an ocean and discover a continent. He had the girth of an earth in him and had to do something with it. He could not have helped it.
He discovered America because he felt crowded.
One would think from the way some people have of talking or writing of immortality that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter of historic fact it has almost always been some mere great man"s helplessness.
When people have to be created and born on purpose, generation after generation of them, to listen to a man, two or three thousand years of them sometimes, on this planet, it is because the man himself when he spoke felt the need of them--and mentioned it. It is the man who is in the habit of addressing his remarks to a few continents and to several centuries who gets them.
I would not dare to say just how or when our next great author on this earth is going to happen to us, but I shall begin to listen hard and look expectant the first time I hear of a man who gets up on his feet somewhere in it and who speaks as if the whole earth were listening to him. If ever there was an earth that is getting ready to listen, and to listen all over, it is this one. And the first great man who speaks in it is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world which has been allowed about a million years now, to get to the point where it could be said to begin to be conscious of being a world at all. And I cannot believe that a world which for the first time in its history has at last the conveniences for listening all over, if it wants to, is not going to produce at the same time a man who shall have something to say to it--a man that shall be worthy of the first single full audience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been thought of. It would seem as if, to say the least, such an audience as this, gathering half in light and half in darkness around a star, would celebrate by having a man to match. It would not be necessary for him to fall back, either, one would think, upon anything that has ever been said or thought of before. Already even in the sight and sounds of this present world has the verse of scripture about the next come true--"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard." It is not conceivable that there shall not be something said unspeakably and incredibly great to the first full house the planet has afforded.
I have gone to the place of books. I have seen before this all the peoples flocking past me under the earth with their little corner-saviors--each with his own little disc of worship all to himself on the planet--part.i.tioned away from the rest for thousands of years. But now the whole face of the earth is changed. No longer can great men and great events be aimed at it and glanced off on it--into single nations. Great men, when they come now, can generally have a world at their feet. It is not possible that we shall not have them.
The whole earth is the wager that we are going to have them. The bids are out--great statesmen, great actors, great financiers, great authors--even millionaires will gradually grow great. It cannot be helped. And it will be strange if someone cannot think of something to say, with the first full house this planet has afforded.
Even as it is now, let any man with a great girth of love in him but speak once--but speak one single round-the-world delight and nations sit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is dying with pneumonia seven seas listen to his breathing. The nations are in galleries on the stage of the earth now, one listening above the other to the same play following around the sunrise. Every one is affected by it--a kind of soul-suction--a great pulling from the world. People who do not want to write at all feel it--a kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction apparently--to a pen. The whole planet kindles every man"s solitude.
Continents are bellows for the glow in him if there is any. The wireless telegraph beckons ideas around the world. "How does a planet applaud?" dreams the young author. "With a faint flush of light?" One would like to be liked by it--speak one"s little piece to it. When one was through, one could hear the soft hurrah through s.p.a.ce.
I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I ever could have thought or had times of thinking it was a little or a lonely world to write in--to flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what a world it was that came to men once and of the world that waits around me--around all of us now--I do like to mention it.
When many years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed for the first time to open the little inside door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel steamer and watched its splendid thrust on the sea, I did not know why it was that I could not be called away from it, or why I stood and watched hour after hour unconscious before it--the thunder and the foam piling up upon my being. I have guessed now. I watch the drive-wheel of an engine now as if I were tracking out at last the last secret of loneliness. I face Time and s.p.a.ce with it. I know I have but to do a true deed and I am crowded round--to help me do it. I know I have but to think a true thought, but to be true and deep enough with a book--feel a worldful for it, put a worldful in it--and the whole planet will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousands of printing presses under a thousand skies I hear truth working softly, saying over and over, and around and around the earth, the word that was given to me to say.
Can any one believe that this strange new, deep, beautiful, clairvoyant feeling a man has nowadays every day, every hour, for the other side of a star, is not going to make arts and men and words and actions great in the world?
Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching the first great gathering-in of a world to listen and to live. The continents are unanimous. There has never been a quorum before. They are getting together at last for the first world-sized man, for the first world-sized word. They are listening him into life. It is really getting to be a planet now, a whole completed articulated, furnished, lived-through, loved-through star, from sun"s end to sun"s end. One sees the sign on it
TO LET TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT.
VIII
THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP
"_Ever there comes an onward phrase to me Of some transcendent music I have heard; No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered, No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory.
But a glad strain of some still symphony That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred._"