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There are some goodish things at sea; for instance, one can feel

A grandeur in the silent man forever at the wheel,

That bit of two-legged intellect, that particle of drill,

Who the huge floundering hulk inspires with reason, brain, and will,

And makes the ship, though skies are black and headwinds whistle loud, Obey her conscience there which feels the loadstar through the cloud; And when by lusty western gales the fullsailed barque is hurled, Towards the great moon which, setting on the silent underworld,

Rounds luridly up to look on ours, and shoots a broadening line,

Of palpitant light from crest to crest across the ridgy brine,

Then from the bows look back and feel a

thrill that never stales,

In that full-bosomed, swan-white pomp of

onward-yearning sails;

Ah, when dear cousin Bull laments that
you can't make a poem,
Take him aboard a clipper-ship, young
Jonathan, and show him

A work of art that in its grace and grandeur

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"T is not a statue, grumbles John; nay, if you come to that,

We think of Hyde Park Corner, and concede you beat us flat

With your equestrian statue to a Nose and a Cocked hat;

But 't is not a cathedral; well, e'en that we will allow,

Both statues and cathedrals are anachronistic now;

Your minsters, coz, the monuments of men who conquered you,

You'd sell a bargain, if we'd take the deans and chapters too;

No; mortal men build nowadays, as always heretofore,

Good temples to the gods which they in very truth adore;

The shepherds of this Broker Age, with all their willing flocks,

Although they bow to stones no more, do bend the knee to stocks,

And churches can't be beautiful though crowded, floor and gallery,

If people worship preacher, and if preacher worship salary;

'T is well to look things in the face, the god o' the modern universe,

Hermes, cares naught for halls of art and libraries of puny verse,

If they don't sell, he notes them thus upon his ledger say, per

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Contra to a loss of so much stone, best Russia duck and paper;

And, after all, about this Art men talk a deal of fudge,

Each nation has its path marked out, from which it must not budge; The Romans had as little art as Noah in his ark,

Yet somehow on this globe contrived to make an epic mark;

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Religion, painting, sculpture, song for these they ran up jolly ticks With Greece and Egypt, but they were great artists in their politics,

And if we make no minsters, John, nor epics, yet the Fates

Are not entirely deaf to men who can build ships and states;

The arts are never pioneers, but men have strength and health

Who, called on suddenly, can improvise a commonwealth,

Nay, can more easily go on and frame them by the dozen, Than you can make a dinner-speech, dear sympathizing cousin:

And, though our restless Jonathan have not your graver bent, sure he Does represent this hand-to-mouth, pert, rapid, nineteenth century; This is the Age of Scramble; men move faster than they did

When they pried up the imperial Past's deep-dusted coffin-lid,

Searching for scrolls of precedent; the wireleashed lightning now Replaces Delphos - men don't leave the steamer for the scow;

What public, were they new to-day, would ever stop to read

The Iliad, the Shanameh, or the Nibelungenlied?

Their public's gone, the artist Greek, the lettered Shah, the hairy Graf Folio and plesiosaur sleep well; we weary o'er a paragraph;

The mind moves planet-like no more, it fizzes, cracks, and bustles; From end to end with journals dry the land o'ershadowed rustles,

As with dead leaves a winter-beech, and, with their breath-roused jars Amused, we care not if they hide the eternal skies and stars;

Down to the general level of the Board of Brokers sinking,

The Age takes in the newspapers, or, to say sooth unshrinking,

The newspapers take in the Age, and stocks do all the thinking.

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"Work! you have no conception how 't will sweeten

Your views of Life and Nature, God and Man;

Had you been forced to earn what you have eaten,

Your heaven had shown a less dyspeptic plan;

At present your whole function is to eat

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And talk ten times as rapidly as you can; Were your shape true to cosmogonic laws, You would be nothing but a pair of jaws.

"Of all the useless beings in creation The earth could spare most easily you bakers

Of little clay gods, formed in shape and fashion

Precisely in the image of their makers; Why, it would almost move a saint to passion,

To see these blind and deaf, the hourly breakers

Of God's own image in their brother men,

Set themselves up to tell the how, where, when,

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He had thee in his eye; 't was Gabriel Sent to reward my faith, I know him well."

""T was Vishnu, thou vile whirligig!"

and so

The good old quarrel was begun anew; One would have sworn the sky was black as sloe,

Had but the other dared to call it blue;

Nor were the followers who fed them slow

To treat each other with their curses, too, Each hating t' other (moves it tears or laughter ?)

Because he thought him sure of hell hereafter.

At last some genius built a bridge of boats Over the stream, and Ahmed's zealots filed Across, upon a mission to (cut throats And) spread religion pure and undefiled; They sowed the propagandist's wildest

oats,

Cutting off all, down to the smallest child, And came back, giving thanks for such

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