University of Virginia Library

IN THE YEAR TEN THOUSAND.

(Two citizens meet in a square of the vast city, Manattia, ages ago called New York).
FIRST MANATTIAN.
Welcome. Whence come you?

SECOND MANATTIAN.
I? The morn was hot;
With wife and babes I took the first air-boat
For polar lands. While huge Manattia baked
Below these August ardors, we could hear
Our steps creak shrill on dense-packed snows, or see
The icy bulks of towering bergs flash green
In the sick arctic light.

FIRST MANATTIAN.
Refreshment, sure!
How close all countries of the world are knit
By these electric air-boats, that to-day
Seem part no less of life than hands or feet!
To think that in the earlier centuries
Men knew this planet swept about her sun,
And men had learned that myriad other globes
Likewise were sweeping round their myriad suns,
Yet dreamed not of the etheric force that makes
One might of motion rule the universe;
Or, if they dreamed of such hid force, were weak
To grasp it as are gnats to swim a sea.

SECOND MANATTIAN.
They dreamed of it; nay, more, if chronicles
Err not, they worshiped it and named it God.
We name it Nature and it worships us;
A monstrous difference! .. This light fountain plays
Cool in its prophyry basin; shall we sit
On this carved couch of stone and hear the winds
Rouse in the elms melodious prophecies
Of a more temperate morrow?

FIRST MANATTIAN.
As you will.
(They sit.)
Watch how those lovely shudderings of the leaves
Make the stars dance like fire-flies in their glooms.
It is a lordly park.

SECOND MANATTIAN.
In truth it is.
And lordliest this of all America's
Great ancient cities; yet they do aver
That once 'twas fairly steeped in hideousness.
The homes of men were wrought with scorn of art,
And all those fantasies of sculpture loved
By us they deemed a vanity. I have seen
Pictures of their grim dwellings in a book
At our chief library, the pile that hoards
Twelve million volumes. Horrors past a doubt
Were these dull squat abodes that huddled close
One to another, row on dreary row,
Whit scarce a hint of our fine frontages,
Towers, gardens, galleries, terraces and courts.
They must indeed have been a sluggard race,
Those ancestors we spring from. It is hard
To dream our beautiful Manattia rose
From such uncouth beginnings.

FIRST MANATTIAN.
You forget
The city in their dim years, as records tell,
Was but a tongue of island—that lean strip
Of territory in which to-day we set
Our palaces of ease for them that age
Or bodily illness incapacitates.
Then, too, these quaint barbarians were split up
In factions of the so-named rich and poor.
The rich held leagues of land, the poor were shorn
Of right in any .. I speak from vague report;
Perchance I am wrong. Manattia's ancient name
Escapes me, even, and I would not re-learn
Its coarse tough sound. In those remoter times
Churches abounded, dedicate to creeds
Of various title, yet the city itself
Swarmed with thieves, murderers, people base of act,
So that the church and prison, side by side,
Rose in the common street, foes hot of feud,
Yet neither conquering .. Strange it seems, all this,
To us, who know the idiocy of sin,
With neither church nor prison for its proof.

SECOND MANATTIAN.
I, too, have heard of lawless days like these,
Though some historians would contend, I think,
That fable is at the root of all events
Writ of past our fourth chiliad—as, indeed,
The story of how a man could rise in wealth
Above his fellows, by the state unchid,
And from the amassment of possessions reap
Honor, not odium, while on every side
Multitudes hungered; or of how disease.
If consciously transmitted to the child
By his begetter, was not crime; or how
Woman was held inferior to the man,
Not ably an equal; how some lives were cursed
With strain of toil from youth to age, while some
Drowsed in unpunished sloth, work being not then
The duty and pride of every soul, as now,
Nor barriered firm, as now, against fatigue
With zeal sole-used for general thrift, and crowned
By individual leisure's boons of calm.

FIRST MANATTIAN.
You draw from shadowy legend, yet we know
That once our race was despicably sunk
In darkness like to this crude savagery,
Howe'er the piteous features of its lot
Have rightly gleamed to us through mists of time.
From grosser types we have risen by grades of change
To what we are; this incontestably
We clutch as truth; but I, for my own part,
Find weightiest cause of wonder when I note
That even as late as our five-thousandth year
(Though fifty-millionth were it aptlier termed!)
Asia, America, Europe, Africa,
Australia, all, were one wild battle of tongues,
Nor spoke, as every earthly land speaks now,
The same clear universal language. Think
What misery of confusion must have reigned!

SECOND MANATTIAN.
Nay, you forget that then humanity
Was not the brotherhood it since has grown.
Ah, fools! it makes one loth to half believe
They could have parcelled our fair world like this
Out into separate hates and called each hate
A nation, with the wolf of war to prowl
Demon-eyed at the boundary-line of each.
Happy are we, by sweet vast union joined,
Not grouped in droves like beasts that gnash their fangs
At neighbor beasts,—we, while new epochs dawn,
Animal yet above all animalism,
Rising toward some serene discerned ideal
Of progress, ever rising, faltering not
By one least pause of retrogression!..

FIRST MANATTIAN.
Still
We die .. we die!..

SECOND MANATTIAN.
Invariably; but death
Brings not the anguish it of old would bring
To those that died before us. Rest and peace
Attend it, no reluctance, tremor or pain.
Long heed of laws fed vitally from health
Has made our ends as pangless as our births.
The imperial gifts of science have prevailed
So splendidly with our mortality
That death is but a natural falling asleep,
Involuntary and tranquil.

FIRST MANATTIAN.
True, but time
Has ever stained our heaven with its dark threat.
Not death, but life, contains the unwillingness
To pass from earth, and science in vain hath sought
An answer to the eternal questions—Whence,
Whither, and For What Purpose? All we gain
Still melts to loss; we build our hope from dream,
Our joy upon illusion, our victory
Upon defeat. .. Hark how those long winds flute
There in the dusky foliage of the park.
Such voices, murmuring large below the night,
Seem ever to my fancy as if they told
The inscrutability of destiny,
The blank futility of all search—perchance
The irony of that nothingness which lies
Beyond its hardiest effort.

SECOND MANATTIAN.
Hush! these words
Are chaff that even the winds whereof you prate
Should whirl as dry leaves to the oblivion
Their levity doth tempt! Already in way
That might seem miracle if less firm through fact,
Hath science plucked from nature lore whose worth
Madness alone dares doubt. As yet, I allow,
With all her grandeur of accomplishment
She hath not pierced beyond matter; but who knows
The hour apocalyptic when her eyes
May flash with tidings from infinitude?

FIRST MANATTIAN.
Then, if she solves the enigma of the world
And steeps in sun all swathed in night till now,
Pushing that knowledge from whose gradual gain
Our thirst hath drunk so deeply, till she cleaves
Finality with it, and at last lays bare
The absolute,—then, brother and friend, I ask
May she not tell us that we merely die,
That immortality is a myth of sense,
That God...?

SECOND MANATTIAN.
Your voice breaks .. let me clasp your hand!
Well, well, so be it, if so she tells. At least
We live our lives out duteously till death,
We on this one mean orb, whose radiant mates
Throb swarming in the heaven our glance may roam.
Whatever message may be brought to us,
Or to the generations following us,
Let this one thought burn rich with self-content:
We live our lives out duteously till death.

(A silence.)
FIRST MANATTIAN.
'Tis a grand thought, but it is not enough!
In spite of all our world hath been and done,
Its glorious evolution from the low
Sheer to the lofty, I, individual, I,
An entity and a personality,
Desire, long, yearn...

SECOND MANATTIAN.
Nay, brother, you alone!
Are there not millions like you!

FIRST MANATTIAN
(with self-reproach).
Pardon me!
(After another longer silence.)
What subtler music those winds whisper now!..
'Tis even as if they had forsworn to breathe
Despair, and dreamed, however dubiously,
Of some faint hope!..

SECOND MANATTIAN.
I had forgot. That news
The astronomers predicted for to-night!..
They promised that the inhabitants of Mars
At last would give intelligible sign
To thousands who await it here on earth.

FIRST MANATTIAN.
I too had quite forgot; so many a time
Failure has cheated quest! Yet still, they say,
To-night at last brings triumph. If it does,
History will blaze with it.

SECOND MANATTIAN.
Let us go forth
Into the great square. All the academies
That line it now must tremble with suspense.