University of Virginia Library

Two stars for ages had in counterpoise
Whirled their great globes about the same great sun,
He radiant in our night while viewless they,
Being planets lit of him, their system's lord.
Yet gloriously each flashed its borrowed beams
Back to their glorious giver, as each rolled
In rhythm and splendor through eternity.
Twin stars were these, if judged by interspace
Of heavenly distance, though they seemed as twin
Solely because close-blent they flamed afar
To orbs that mightier voids repelled and swathed.

Yet deeps of difference were between these twain,
Shining as either shone the satellite
Of its vast luminary, and drinking life
Sheer from his rays. Both stars to throngs they held
Were full of mutable charm as earth is full,—
With wood, vale, mountain, lake and rioting sea,
Chill bourne or tropic, zone of ice or bloom.
Yet one star held a people in soul and aim
Less than earth's man at basest. Right and law
Were palsied in its polity, and the toll
Ambition paid to power was coin of bribe.
Justice, with eyes unbandaged, bore no scales;
Whole streets of towns were dense with droves of poor,
Whose lips wan famine made too weak to curse
The tyrannies cheating them of vital bread;
Women were thralled and spurned there; war at whiles
Flared its red torch and left sad mounds of slain
To mark the shadow it cast. The rich lolled sleek
In luxury, with their villas, gardens, groves,
Their games and wine, their lutes and dancing-girls,
Their pomps of vice, their raillery, languor, scoffs,
And their immeasurable fatigue. The star
Clear through its fair entirety reeked with ill.
Some spell malign had smitten it, and it swung
Piteous yet beautiful, through gulfs of sky.

Its mate for thousands of slow years had seen
The ignominy it shrined, and fervently
Had longed to stir by some celestial means
Of counsel its rank torpors of disuse.
Realmed in that sister star a race abode
So taintless that their lives, from death to birth,
Were snow for chastity, yet fire for love.
Honor and truth were daily breath to all;
Woman with man had interchanged as boons
The traits of noblest worth in either sex,
Till vigor and sweetness, intellect and heart,
Authority and obedience, doubt and trust,
Met in one equal bond of husband, wife,
Sire, mother, son or daughter, and each note
Of kinship melted to a single sound,
Simple yet complex, tender yet sublime,
Humanity. In their homes, as in their marts,
Labor was unison of want and help,
A glad democracy of mine and thine,
A scorn of greed, a reverence of self-rule.
Crime loomed a vague historic memory here,
Even as disease and war, pests fangless now.
Where ancient squares with palaces were flanked,
While forms of great dead poets engirt him, pale
In marble perpetuity, year by year
The living poet exaltedly would read
His lay to listeners whom its music stirred,
And often with rapture; for though science illumed
Abysses of the unknowable and blessed
Their star with order, wisdom, peace, content,
Still, poesy had not swooned below the glare
Of fact, but ever wreathed in fantasy
The real, until ideal and real were knit
Like branch to leaf, or stem to flower. .. The calm
Of this clean perfect world was absolute.
Death bred no gloom, for death was long ago
Shorn of all pain or struggle, and sank on those
It lulled as ripeness on a falling fruit
That drops in dewy autumnal grasses, grown
So soft and ripe themselves you scarce may hear
The faint thin echo of its lawnward lapse.
To live was health; to die the drowsy lease
Of sense, in drifts of throeless quietude,
With holocausts on pyres whence pitying flame,
Odorous as lustral, shot to heaven alike
Eulogium, epitaph and elegy,
And so wrought requiescats kindlier far
Than mouldering headstones of forgotten graves.

And yet to live meant splendid ease and range
Of search, desire and opportunity
Whereof we dream not save in flights of myth.
Forces that greet our ken by no dim guess,
Bowed their fond servitors; all drink whose lure
Clouds the sane mind they loathed as hurt and bane;
The food they ate was very marrow and pith
Of sustenance, yet no dumb creature bled
To sate their whims of appetite, but viands
For us ambrosial, though to them plain birth
Of chemic lore past earthly formula,
Nourished their needs; they swept o'ersea with speed
To us deemed fabulous; air had meekly told
The mystery of its ways to their winged ships.
They pored through visual glass of wondrous tube
On lands of other planets, noting there
Unnumbered forms of thrift or negligence,
But ever scanned most lucidly the globe
Nearest their own. The headlong sin of this
Wrung them with sorrow; it was the only blot
On their white happiness; a myriad eyes
Daily regarded that insensate sphere,
And in a myriad souls the wish had crept
To tell its habitants what sluggard wills
And nerveless aims on ruin had stranded them.
The pure star yearned to reach the faultful one;
Throbs of compassion urged this mood of help;
Through telescopes of power magnificent
Beside our optic effort when its force
Of mechanism hath no residual trick
To further map the moon, or test the gold
Smelted in Saturn's wizard rings, the star
Of good looked on the star of evil, and declared
Its fell degeneracy. Pity there
Wept with a silent weakness that was worth
A warrior's brawn. New decades came and wove
Elaborate schemes for intercourse, yet each
Being tested was found futile. Still endured
In one star the desire to wake, warn, cheer,
Ameliorate; and still in one endured
The dumb blind sensuous anarchy that made
Millions reel reckless from the paths of right.

At last the watchers thrilled with hope; their craft
Aerial, that could leap to pierce the films
Of fleeciest clouds, had ever paused in dread
At loftier voyages. Arctic bournes of naught,
Illimitable vacuum, feeding cold
As blood feeds flesh, had ever spread to them
Its menaces of blank discouragement.
Ether, an ambient ether, as they knew,
Prevailed through all creation, verging it
On multitudinous borders, like the wash
Continual of the same pervasive sea
Embosoming an archipelago.
And yet what keel of æronautic skill
(Long ancestors of their best brains had asked)
Were shrewd enough to dare such raw bleak wastes?
Must these not ever bide unnavigable?
Or, if some spirit of intrepidity
Heroic essayed their freezing amplitudes,
Must he not perish in dire strait ere half
The attainment of that stellar goal he craved?

And yet the watchers thrilled with hope at last.
For one among them, dowered beyond his kind,
A youth with limbs like sculpture hewn from light
And eyes that burned below the majesty
Of brows our Greece hath never given her gods,
Rose up and spake before a populace
That swarmed the imperial terraces and courts
Of the great statue-girded square. His voice
Pealed in melodious eloquence, and rang
Nobility, candor, zeal, faith, sacrifice.
He swayed his hearers even as blast will sway
Ocean; irradiate seemed his face to those
Tranced by the angelic ardor of its look;
And while erelong with murmurs, hands upflung,
Smiles, tears, they surged by thousands close to him,
In protest of their lealty, thus he spoke:

“We all have seen the world we all would help;
Its folly of degradation shields no crime
From our sharp quest; yet its one aid is we.
Still, he who dares its frontier challenges
Death, but he dying, if die he must, shall live
Thenceforth in immemorial sanctity
Of honor for the races that shall press
Their footprints on his undistinguished clay.
No worthier wage could he or ask or seek,
This man who scorned himself to save a world.
For we have probed infinity to its last
Lair of the insoluble, and while we shrink
From all rash arrogance of postulate
Affirming no God is, have lost desire
To find God elsewhere than in godliness
Of duteous healthful days from birth to bier.
Long years ere now desire hath failed in us
For immortality that should mete so much
Paid bliss for so much virtue our side death.
The immortality we would win is here,
In deeds of unreluctant righteousness.
Our heaven is wide as human sympathy
May push her boundaries, folding them who stamp
On evil as them who faint in her fierce coils;
Our hell is narrow as ignorance and fear,
Twin architects of ill, can fashion it,
With caves that mine the glooms of bigotry
And roofs that scoff the sun from rafters thick.
Our church is charity, our religion, love;
The fanes we erect are wrought with masonries
Reason had learnt the skill of; for she took
Hard plinths of truth and mortised each to each
With soil that bloody and tearful martyrdoms
Had soaked when superstition ruled, not she.
Hence they stand firm, and those that worship there
Glow the fanatics honesty begets,
With rite and ceremonial that are acts,
Not forms—benevolence and compassion, not
Their lazy reflex. Friends, who deign to list
My utterance, I have shaped, or this I deem,
A peerless air-ship that shall strike its beak
Safe in the soil of yonder waiting world.
Its giant valves hide stores of element
Wherewith by bond of willing ducts to fill
The faint lungs through the lips that gasp. Its weight
Hath nicety of deft alternation, now
A feather and now a plummet, as demand
Shall fix. The voyage that I shall make with it
Taunts, if ye will, destruction. Yet to die
Aspiring thus I rate a glory above
All fruits of triumph that a soul may win
While honor points the road that safety guards...
O friends, your beating hearts beat time with mine!
This in the enkindled looks that leap to me
I note and treasure. Would your hand-clasps all
Were concentrate in one, so I might gain
Sweet multiplicity of encouragement
Merged in a single fervor of farewell!”

He ceased, and tumult roared response to him,
With plaudits volleying from impetuous throats.
Legions flocked nearer, crying and kneeling; some
Caught at his robe and kissed it; some held up
Their children, that his image might remain
Regnant in memories of the little ones
When they themselves were silence; women tore
Flowers from their breasts and flung them at his feet;
The statues of the great dead seemed to rock
In the great square below this turbulence
Of acclammation, while o'er all a sky
Like hollowed amethyst framed a huger sun
Than ours, with lordlier disc and ampler blaze.

The morrow of this most fateful day beheld
His embarkation on the venturing ship.
Throngs met once more, to mark his going; and now
The elation they had shown but yesterday
Had vanished wholly; a stillness born of awe
And mixed with melancholy in place of joy
Reigned on each visage as it ruled each mind.
But he, the undaunted aspirant, strong son
Of bravery and self-abnegation, smiled
His bright exultance on the gathered mass,
Then turned, and with an athlete's vault of ease
Lit on the pendulous deck of his weird bark,
Tethered beneath yet softly oscillant
In the bland air that buoyed it. Wide it loomed,
A thing of tenuous frailty for the sight,
But through its delicate branchwork of contour
Slept energies mad tempests could not drain.
No captain, helmsman, sailor, save himself.
Guided the vessel; he, companionless,
Went journeying forth upon the infinite...
A moment, and he had cut the cords that bound
His quivering argosy; it shot aloft
Like some miraculous bird, and following it
Rose a long cry, that echoed on for years
Through histories of the people whence it sprang.

Fleetly the ship sped upward; but ere dusk
They scanned it well through many an optic glass
Whose lenses had wrung secrets from their night.
They saw the audacious mariner of heaven
As clearly as if he plowed some neighbor sea.
All could not gaze, but those who saw not heard
Of his unfaltering courage, and the tact
Wherewith he had ably governed rope and sail.

“His face is like a deity's,” they avowed.
“He feels no fear; none ever yet hath scaled
So dizzy a height above us, yet he stands
Without one glimpse of tremor. .. Look, he waves
A hand to us whom he no more discerns;
For knowing of how we still discern him, still
He signals. .. Hail to him, grand soul!”

Night fell, and drowned him from their view. Till dawn
Vague hordes held sleepless vigil, some with hope,
Some with despair—with fierce anxiety all.
But when at last the whitening orient drove
Gloom from the lustrous labyrinths it paled,
They sought their first dim chance to peer again
At the high resolute ship. .. And then a moan
Of sorrow arose that seemed to touch and stay
The conduits of the fountains of the morn.
For now they saw the ship, in ruinous plight,
Plunge, veer, wheel, battle, as if some hate unseen
Clenched it, while he that strove to man it leapt,
In terrible pathos of unquelled resolve,
From prow to stern through flurry of tattered sails
And tangle of flying cordage...

Then they saw
Hope fade from out his face. “Lost! lost!” they wailed...
Many drew shuddering from the sight, and bowed
Their heads in anguish. .. Those that yet stared on,
Averred long after that his countenance,
Just ere the steep death snatched him whence he soared,
Was worth a life to have witnessed; so serene
And holy it beamed, and so divinely proud,
Even at the instant of his overthrow.

Ages have passed since thus he dared, thus died;
Yet on the star he rose from towers a tomb
Statelier than all the monuments it rears.
His bones rest here, say some, but others claim
His downward body in that stupendous fall
Turned vapor, and so vanished meteor-like...
And yet what matter if tomb or cenotaph?..
Among its clustering turrets the four winds
Flute requiems, and below, in lichened stone,
The unobliterated legend lives:
“No mortal ever failed who strove as he.”