Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/250

238 I am the child of earth and air and sea! My lullaby by hoarse Silurian storms Was chanted; and through endless changing forms Of plant and bird and beast unceasingly The toiling ages wrought to fashion me. Lo, these large ancestors have left a breath Of their strong souls in mine, defying death And change. I grow and blossom as the tree, And ever feel the deep-delving earthy roots Binding me daily to the common clay. But with its airy impulse upward shoots My life into the realms of light and day; And thou, O Sea, stern mother of my soul, Thy tempests sing in me, thy billows roll!

A sacred kinship I would not forego Binds me to all that breathes; through endless strife The calm and deathless dignity of life Unites each bleeding victim to its foe. What life is in its essence, who doth know? The iron chain that all creation girds Encompassing myself and beasts and birds, Forges its bond unceasing from below— From water, stone, and plant, e'en unto man. Within the rose a pulse that answered mine (Though hushed and silently its life-tide ran) I oft have felt; but when with joy divine I hear the song-thrush warbling in my brain, I glory in this vast creation's chain.

I stood and gazed with wonder blent with awe Upon the giant footprints Nature left Of her primeval march in yonder cleft; A fern-leaf's airy woof, a reptile's claw, In their eternal slumber there I saw In deftly-wrought sarcophagi of stone. What humid tempests, from rank forests blown, Whirled from its parent stem yon slender straw? What scaly creature of a monstrous breed Bore yonder web-foot through the tepid tide? Oh, what wide vistas thronged with mighty deed And mightier thought have here mine eyes descried!—