Poetical Works of Robert Bridges excluding the eight dramas

Whose many inventions of world-wide luxury have changed
Life's very face:—but enough we hear of progress, enough have
Our conscious science and comforts trumpeted; altho'
Hardly can I, who so many years eagerly frequented
Bartholomew's fountain, not speak of things to awaken
Kind old Hippocrates, howe'er he slumbereth, entomb'd
'Neath the shatter'd winejars and ruined factories of Cos,
Or where he wander'd in Thessalian Larissa:
For when his doctrine, which Rome had wisely adopted,
Sank lost with the treasures of her deep-foundering empire,
No art or science grew so contemptible, order'd
So by mere folly, windy caprice, superstition and chance,
As boastful Medicine, with humours fit for a madhouse,
Save when some Sydenham, like Samson among the Philistines,
Strode bond-bursting along with a smile of genial instinct.
Nor when here and there some ray, in darkness arising,
Hopefully seem'd to herald the coming dawn, (as when a Laennec
Or Jenner invented his meed of worthy remembrance,)
Did one mind foresee, one seer foretell the appearance
Of that unexpected daylight that arose upon our time.

Who dream'd that living air poison'd our surgery, coating
All our sheeny weapons with germs of an invisible death,
Till he saw the sterile steel work with immunity, and save
Quickly as its warring scimitars of victory had slain?
Saw what school-tradition for nature's kind method admir'd,
—In those lifedraining slow cures and bedridden agues,—
Forgotten, or condemn'd as want of care in a surgeon?

Tho' Medicine makes not so plain an appeal to the vulgar,
Yet she lags not a whit: her pregnant theory touches
Deeper discoveries, her more complete revolution
Gives promise of wider benefits in larger abundance.

Where she nam'd the disease she now separates the bacillus;

418

Sets the atoms of offence, those blind and sickly bloodeaters,
'Neath lens and daylight, forcing their foul propagations,
Which had ever prosper'd in dark impunity unguest,
Now to behave in sight, deliver their poisonous extract
And their strange self-brew'd, self-slaying juice to be handled,
Experimented upon, set aside and stor'd to oppose them.

So novel and obscure a research, such hard revelations
Of Nature's cabinet,—tho' with fact amply accordant,
And by hypothesis much dark difficulty resolving,
Are not quickly receiv'd nor approv'd, and sensitive idlers,
Venturing in the profound terrible penetralia of life,
Are shock'd by a method that shuns not contamination
With cruel Nature's most secret processes unmaskt.
And yet in all mankind's disappointed history, now first
Have his scouts push'd surely within his foul enemies' lines,
And his sharpshooters descried their insidious foe,
Those swarming parasites, that barely within the detection
Of manifold search-light, have bred, swimming unsuspected
Thro' man's brain and limbs, slaying with loathly pollution
His beauty's children, his sweet scions of affection,
In fev'rous torment and tears, his home desolating
Of their fair innocence, breaking his proud passionate heart,
And his kindly belief in God's good justice arraigning.

With what wildly directed attack, what an armory illjudged,
Has he, (alas, poor man,) with what cumbrous machination
Sought to defend himself from their Lilliputian onslaught;
Aye discharging around him, in obscure night, at a venture,
Ev'ry missile which his despair confus'dly imagin'd;
His simples, compounds, specifics, chemical therapeutics,
Juice of plants, whatever was nam'd in lordly Salerno's
Herbaries and gardens, vipers, snails, all animal filth,
Incredible quackeries, the pretentious jugglery of knaves,
Green electricities, saints' bones and priestly anointings.
Fools! that oppose his one scientific intelligent hope!
Grant us an hundred years, and man shall hold in abeyance
These foul distempers, and with this world's benefactors

419

Shall Pasteur obtain the reward of saintly devotion,
His crown heroic, who fought not destiny in vain.

University of Virginia Library