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
