University of Virginia Library

I flung a stone into a grassy field;—
How many tiny creatures there may yield
(I thought) their petty lives through that rude shock!
To me a pebble, 't is to them a rock—
Gigantic, cruel, fraught with sudden death.
Perhaps it crusht an ant, perhaps its breath
Alone tore down a white and glittering palace,
And the small spider damns the giant's malice
Who wrought the wreck—blasted his pretty art!

Who knows what day some saunterer, light of heart,
An idle wanderer through the fields of space,
Large-limbed, big-brained, to whom our puny race
Seems small as insects,—one whose footstep jars
On some vast world-orb islanded by stars,—
May fling a stone and crush our earth to bits,
And all that men have builded by their wits?
“Ah, what a loss!” you say; “our bodies go,
But not our temples, statues, and the glow
Of glorious canvases; and not the pages
Our poets have illumed through myriad ages.
What boots the insect's loss? Another day
Will see the selfsame ant-hill and the play
Of light on dainty web the same. But blot
All human art from this terrestrial plot,
Something indeed would pass that nevermore
Would light the universe as once before!”
The spider's work is not original,—
You hold,—but what of ours? I fear that all
We do is just the same thing over and over.
Take Life: you have the woman and her lover;
'T is old as Eden; naught is new in that!
Take Building, and you reach ere long the flat
Nile desert sands, by way of France, Rome, Greece.
And there is poetry—our bards increase
In numbers, not in sweetness, not in force,
Since, he, sublimest poet of this globe,
Forgotten now, poured forth the chant of Job—
Where Man with the Eternal holds discourse.
No, no! The forms may change, but even they
Come round again. Could we but truly scan it,
We'd find in the heavens some little, busy planet,
Whence all we are was borrowed. If to-day
The imagined giant flung his ponderous stone,
And we and all our far-stretched schemes were done,
His were a scant remorse and short-lived trouble,
Like mine for those small creatures in the stubble.