Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/141

 temples to his Muse. At present, however, the bard must not hover on the horizon of Capital. We must forge ahead. Nothing in the way is sacred. The Young Turks themselves once spent a few piasters in this business of redemption. They tried to mow down the Arabs to pave the way for the European steam engine. Now the English are conspiring against the lethal but sacred lethargy of the Euphrates. They will dam the river to bless its valley. They will mutilate it, chop it into pools, so to speak, and cage its currents in canals and ditches to make them sing in the wilderness the song of plenty. Indeed, there is a kind of poetry, deep and elemental as Ossian's, even in the achievements of science, even in the mechanical marvels of engineering. We live in an age, which, in its vast inclusions at least, is the most poetic of all ages. No nation, however far removed from the pivot of its dynamic influence, no people, however stolid and hidebound, is free to shake off its thrall or to reject its boon. A