Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/171

MERIDIAN That children's children have a share of love.

Through them she proffers us a second chance;

With their young eyes we see her hands advance

To crown the sports once banished from her sight;

With them we see old wrong become the right,

Tread pleasant halls, a healthy life behold

Less stinted than the cloister-range of old—

When the last hour of morning sleep was lost

And prayer was sanctified by dusk and frost,

And hungry tutors taught a class unfed

That a full stomach meant an empty head.

For them a tenth Muse, Beauty, here and there

Has touched the landmarks, making all more fair;—

We knew her not, save in our stolen dreams

Or stumbling song, but now her likeness gleams

Through chapel aisles, and in the house where Art

Has builded for her praise its shrines apart.

Now the new Knowledge, risen like a sun,

Makes bright for them the hidden ways that none

Revealed to us; or haply would dethrone

The gods of old, and rule these hearts alone

From yonder stronghold. By unnumbered strings

She draws our sons to her discoverings,—

Traces the secret paths of force, the heat

That makes the stout heart give its patient beat,

Follows the stars through æons far and free,

And shows what forms have been and are to be.

Such things are plain to these we hither brought,

More strange and varied than ourselves were taught;

But has the iris of the murmuring shell

A charm the less because we know full well

Sweet Nature's trick? Is Music's dying fall

Less finely blent with strains antiphonal

Because within a harp's quick vibratings

We count the tremor of the spirit's wings? 141