Page:Poems, Household Edition, Emerson, 1904.djvu/227

Rh Entering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming Falls

Of loud Bog River, suddenly confront

Two of our mates returning with swift oars.

One held a printed journal waving high

Caught from a late-arriving traveller,

Big with great news, and shouted the report

For which the world had waited, now firm fact,

Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,

And landed on our coast, and pulsating

With ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries

From boat to boat, and to the echoes round,

Greet the glad miracle. Thought's new-found path

Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways,

Match God's equator with a zone of art,

And lift man's public action to a height

Worthy the enormous cloud of witnesses,

When linked hemispheres attest his deed.

We have few moments in the longest life

Of such delight and wonder as there grew,—

Nor yet unsuited to that solitude:

A burst of joy, as if we told the fact

To ears intelligent; as if gray rock

And cedar grove and cliff and lake should know

This feat of wit, this triumph of mankind;

As if we men were talking in a vein

Of sympathy so large, that ours was theirs,

And a prime end of the most subtle element

Were fairly reached at last. Wake, echoing caves!