Page:Poems, Household Edition, Emerson, 1904.djvu/228

192 Bend nearer, faint day-moon! Yon thundertops,

Let them hear well! 't is theirs as much as ours.

A spasm throbbing through the pedestals

Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent,

Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill

To be a brain, or serve the brain of man.

The lightning has run masterless too long;

He must to school and learn his verb and noun

And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage,

Spelling with guided tongue man's messages

Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea.

And yet I marked, even in the manly joy

Of our great-hearted Doctor in his boat

(Perchance I erred), a shade of discontent;

Or was it for mankind a generous shame,

As of a luck not quite legitimate,

Since fortune snatched from wit the lion's part?

Was it a college pique of town and gown,

As one within whose memory it burned

That not academicians, but some lout,

Found ten years since the Californian gold?

And now, again, a hungry company

Of traders, led by corporate sons of trade,

Perversely borrowing from the shop the tools

Of science, not from the philosophers,

Had won the brightest laurel of all time.

'T was always thus, and will be; hand and head

Are ever rivals: but, though this be swift,