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Yes, every nook these youthful feet explore, Just as our sires and grandsires did of yore; So all life's opening paths, where nature led Their fathers' feet, the children's children tread. 255 Roll the round century's five score years away, Call from our storied past that earliest day When great Eliphalet (I can see him now,

Big name, big frame, big voice and beetling brow), Then young Eliphalet - ruled the rows of boys 260 In homespun gray or old world corduroys,

And save for fashion's whims, the benches show
The self-same youths, the very boys we know.
Time works strange marvels; since I trod the
green

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And swung the gates, what wonders I have seen! 265 But come what will, the sky itself may fallAs things of course the boy accepts them all. The prophet's chariot, drawn by steeds of flame, For daily use our travelling millions claim ; The face we love a sunbeam makes our own; 270 No more the surgeon hears the sufferer's groan; What unwrit histories wrapped in darkness lay Till shovelling Schliemann bared them to the day Your Richelieu says, and says it well, my lord, The pen is (sometimes) mightier than the sword; 275 Great is the goosequill, say we all; Amen!

Sometimes the spade is mightier than the pen ;

It shows where Babel's terraced walls were raised,

257. Eliphalet Pearson, the first principal of the school, and in later life, professor in the Theological Seminary.

274.

"Beneath the rule of men entirely great

The pen is mightier than the sword."

Edward Bulwer Lytton's drama of Richelieu, Act II. Scene 2. 277. Layard between 1845 and 1850 unearthed Nineveh. The results of his excavations are published in the very interesting work, Nineveh and its Remains.

The slabs that cracked when Nimrod's palace

blazed,

Unearths Mycenæ, rediscovers Troy;

280 Calmly he listens, that immortal boy.

A new Prometheus tips our wands with fire, A mightier Orpheus strains the whispering wire, Whose lightning thrills the lazy winds outrun And hold the hours as Joshua stayed the sun, 285 So swift, in truth, we hardly find a place

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For those dim fictions known as time and space. Still a new miracle each year supplies, See at his work the chemist of the skies, Who questions Sirius in his tortured rays 290 And steals the secret of the solar blaze.

Hush! while the window-rattling bugles play The nation's airs a hundred miles away! That wicked phonograph! hark! how it swears! Turn it again and make it say its prayers! 295 And was it true, then, what the story said Of Oxford's friar and his brazen head?

279. Mycena, the ancient royal city of Argos, and Troy, the scene of the Iliad, have been uncovered by "shovelling Schliemann."

281. Prometheus in Greek mythology made men of clay and animated them by means of fire which he stole from heaven. The reference is to the electric light.

282. Orpheus's skill in music was so wonderful that he could make even trees and rocks follow him. The telephone and phonograph were just coming into common use when the poem was read.

290. In the spectroscope.

296. Friar Roger Bacon, who lived in the latter half of the thirteenth century was a scientific investigator, whom popular ignorance made to be a magician. He was said to have conatructed a brazen head, from which great things were to be expected when it should speak, but the exact moment could not be known. While Bacon and another friar were asleep and an

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While wondering science stands, herself perplexed At each day's miracle, and asks "what next?" The immortal boy, the coming heir of all, 300 Springs from his desk to urge the flying ball," Cleaves with his bending oar the glassy waves, With sinewy arm the dashing current braves, The same bright creature in these haunts of ours That Eton shadowed with her "antique towers." Boy! Where is he? the long-limbed youth inquires,

305

Whom his rough chin with manly pride inspires; Ah, when the ruddy cheek no longer glows, When the bright hair is white as winter snows, When the dim eye has lost its lambent flame, 310 Sweet to his ear will be his school-boy name! Nor think the difference mighty as it seems Between life's morning and its evening dreams; Fourscore, like twenty, has its tasks and toys; In earth's wide school-house all are girls and boys.

attendant was keeping watch, the brazen head spoke the words, Time is. The attendant thought that too commonplace a statement to make it worth while to wake his master. Time was,

said the head, and then Time is past, and with that fell to the ground with a crash and never could be set up again.

300. See Thomas Gray's On a Distant Prospect of Eton Col

ege:

"Who foremost now delight to cleave,

With pliant arm, thy glassy wave?

The captive linnet which enthral ?

What idle progeny succeed

To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?"

304. See the ode just cited and beginning:

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"Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,

That crown the watery glade,

Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade."

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