Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/461

THE SKULL IN THE GOLD DRIFT All that has life, unnurtured, and the planet

Was paradise, the true Saturnian Earth!

Far toward the poles was stretched the happy garden;

Earth kept it fair by warmth from her own breast;

Toil had not come to dwarf her sons and harden;

No crime (there was no want) perturbed their rest.

How lived thy kind? Was there no duty blended

With all their toilless joy,—no grand desire?

Perchance as shepherds on the meads they tended

Their flocks, and knew the pastoral pipe and lyre;

Until a hundred happy generations,

Whose birth and death had neither pain nor fear,

At last, in riper ages, brought the nations

To modes which we renew who greet thee here.

How stately then they built their royal cities,

With what strong engines speeded to and fro;

What music thrilled their souls; what poets' ditties

Made youth with love, and age with honor glow!

And had they then their Homer, Kepler, Bacon?

Did some Columbus find an unknown clime?

Was there an archetypal Christ, forsaken

Of those he died to save, in that far time?

When came the end? What terrible convulsion

Heaved from within the Earth's distended shell?

What pent-up demons, by their fierce repulsion,

Made of that sun-lit crust a sunless hell?

How, when the hour was ripe, those deathful forces

In one resistless doom o'erwhelmed ye all;

Ingulfed the seas and dried the river courses,

And made the forests and the cities fall!

Ah me! with what a sudden, dreadful thunder

The whole round world was split from pole to pole! 431