Page:New lands - (IA newlands00fort).pdf/19

 They have, or they have not, been seen, by reflection, in the skies, of Sweden and Alaska. As one will. Whether acceptable, or too preposterous to be thought of, our data are of rabbles of living things that have been seen in the sky; also of processions of military beings—monsters that live in the sky and die in the sky, and spatter this earth with their red life-fluids—ships from other worlds that have been seen by millions of the inhabitants of this earth, exploring, night after night, in the sky of France, England, New England, and Canada—signals from the moon, which, according to notable indications, may not be so far from this earth as New York is from London—definitely reported and, in some instances, multitudinously witnessed, events that have been disregarded by our opposition—

A scientific priestcraft—

"Thou shalt not!" is crystallized in its frozen textbooks.

I have data upon data upon data of new lands that are not far away. I hold out expectations and the materials of new hopes and new despairs and new triumphs and new tragedies. I hold out my hands to point to the sky—there is a hierarchy that utters me manacles, I think—there is a dominant force that pronounces prisons that have dogmas for walls for such thoughts. It binds its formulas around all attempting extensions.

But sounds have been heard in the sky. They have been heard, and it is not possible to destroy the records of them. They have been heard. In their repetitions and regularities of series and intervals, we shall recognize perhaps interpretable language. Columns of clouds, different-colored by sunset, have vibrated to the artillery of other worlds like the strings of a cosmic harp, and I conceive of no buzzing of insects that can forever divert attention from such dramatic reverberations. Language has shone upon the dark parts of the moon: luminous exclamations that have fluttered in the lunar crater Copernicus; the eloquence of the starlike light in Aristarchus; hymns that have been chanted in lights and shades upon Linné; the wilder, luminous music in Plato—

But not a sound that has been heard in the sky, not a thing that has fallen from the sky, not a thing that "should not be," but that has nevertheless been seen in the sky can we, with