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 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. Mycenae, 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 constructed 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 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 check 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 lege: "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, f 304. See the ode just cited and beginning: "Ye distant spires, ye antique towers, That crown the watery glade, Where grateful Science still adores 315 Brothers, forgive my wayward fancy. Who Can guess beforehand what his pen will do? Too light my strain for listeners such as these, Whom graver thoughts and soberer speech shall please. Is he not here whose breath of holy song 320 Has raised the downcast eyes of faith so long? Are they not here, the strangers in your gates, For whom the wearied ear impatient waits, The large-brained scholars whom their toils release, 325 The bannered heralds of the Prince of Peace? In years long past our student-benches claimed; Such he whose record time's destroying march 335 Home of our sires, where learning's temple rose, While yet they struggled with their banded foes, 319. One of the visitors present was the Rev. Dr. Ray Palmer, author of the well-known hymn: 325. Dr. Holmes in a pleasant paper of reminiscences, Cinders from the Ashes has dwelt at length on his boyish recollections of Horatio Balch Hackett, a schoolmate, and known later as the learned Biblical scholar and student of Palestine explorations. 329. The reference is to Edward Robinson, the pioneer of scientific travel in the Holy Land, one of whose best known discoveries was of the remains of an arch of an ancient bridge thereafter called "Robinson's Arch." As in the west thy century's sun descends, One parting gleam its dying radiance lends. Darker and deeper though the shadows fall 340 From the gray towers on Doubting Castle's wall, Though Pope and Pagan re-array their hosts, And her new armor youthful Science boasts, Truth, for whose altar rose this holy shrine, Shall fly for refuge to these bowers of thine; 345 No past shall chain her with its rusted vow, No Jew's phylactery bind her Christian brow, But faith shall smile to find her sister free, And nobler manhood draw its life from thee. Long as the arching skies above thee spread, 350 As on thy groves the dews of heaven are shed, With currents widening still from year to year, And deepening channels, calm, untroubled, clear, Flow the twin streamlets from thy sacred hill Pieria's fount and Siloam's shaded rill! 354. Pieria was the fabled home of the Muses and the birthplace of Orpheus; Siloam, a pool near Jerusalem, often mentioned by the prophets and in the New Testament, has passed into poetry through Milton's lines: "Or if Sion-hill Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook, that flowed Fast by the oracle of God." Paradise Lost, Book I., 1. 10. And through the first two lines of Reginald Heber's hymn: - "By cool Siloam's shady rill How sweet the lily grows. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. JAMES BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. AMES RUSSELL LOWELL was born February 22, 1819, at Elmwood, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the house which he still occupies. Ilis early life was spent in Cambridge, and he has sketched many of the scenes in it very delightfully in Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, in his volume of Fireside Travels, as well as in his early poem, An Indian Summer Reverie. His father was a Congregationalist minister of Boston, and the family to which he belongs has had a strong representation in Massachusetts. His grandfather, John Lowell, was an eminent jurist, the Lowell Institute of Boston owes its endowment to John Lowell, a cousin of the poet, and the city of Lowell was named after Francis Cabot Lowell, an uncle, who was one of the first to begin the manufacturing of cotton in New England. Lowell was a student at Harvard, and was graduated in 1838, when he gave a class poem, and in 1841 his first volume of poems, A Year's Life, was published. His bent from the beginning was more decidedly literary than that of any contempo |