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Poems:
Old and New
by
Frederick George Scott
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A
DREAM OF THE PREHISTORIC.
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NAKED
and shaggy, they herded at eve by the sound of the
seas,
When the sky and the ocean were
red as with blood from the battles
of God,
And the wind like a monster sped forth with its
feet on the rocks and
the trees,
And the sands of the desert blew
over the wastes of the drought-smitten
sod.
Here, mad with the torments of hunger, despairing
they sank to
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rest, |
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Some crouching alone in their
anguish, some gathered in groups
on the beach;
And with tears almost human the mother looked down
at the babe on
her breast,
And her pain was the germ of our
love, and her cry was the root of
our speech. [Page 31]
Then a cloud from the sunset arose, like a cormorant
gorged with
its
prey,
And extended its wings on the
sky till it smothered the stars in
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gloom, |
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And
ever the famine-worn faces were wet with the wind-carried
spray,
And dimly the voice of the deep
to their ears was a portent of doom.
And the dawn that rose up on the morrow, apparelled
in gold like a
priest,
Through the smoke of the incense
of morning, looked down on a
vision of death;
For the vultures were gathered together and circled
with joy to
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feast |
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On hearts that had ceased from
their sorrow, and lips that had yielded
their breath.
Then the ages went by like a dream, and the shore-line
emerged from
the deep,
And the stars as they watched
through the years saw a change on
the face of the earth; [Page 32]
For over the blanket of sand that had covered the
dead in their sleep
Great forests grew up with their
green, and the sources of rivers
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| had
birth. |
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And
here in the after-times, man, the white-faced and
smooth- handed,
came by,
And he built him a city to dwell
in and temples of prayer to his God;
He filled it with music and beauty, his spirit aspired
to the sky,
While the dead by whose pain it
was fashioned lay under the ground
that he trod.
He wrenched from great Nature her secrets, the
stars in their
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he named, |
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He weighed them and measured their
orbits; he harnessed the horses
of steam;
He captured the lightnings of heaven, the waves
of the ocean he tamed,—
And ever the wonder amazed him
as one that awakes from a dream.
[Page 33]
But under the streets and the markets, the banks
and the temples of
prayer,
Where humanity laboured and plotted,
or loved with an instinct
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| divine, |
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Deep
down in the silence and gloom of the earth that
had shrouded
them there,
Where the fossil remains of a
skull and the bones of what once was
a spine.
Enfolded in darkness forever, untouched by the changes
above,
And mingled as clay with the clay
which the hands of the ages had
brought,
Were the hearts in whose furnace of anguish was
smelted the |
35 |
| gold
of our love, |
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And
the brains from whose twilight of instinct has risen
the dawn of
our thought.
But the law, that was victor of old with its heel
on the neck of the brute,
Still tramples our hearts in the
darkness, still grinds down our face
in the dust; [Page 34]
We are sown in corruption and anguish—whose
fingers will gather
the fruit?
Our life is but lent for a season—for
whom do we hold it in trust?
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In the vault of the sky overhead, in the gulfs that
lie under our feet,
The wheels of the universe turn,
and the laws of the universe blend;
The pulse of our life is in tune with the rhythm
of forces that beat
In the surf of the furthest star’s
sea, and are spent and regathered
to spend.
Yet we trust in the will of the Being whose fingers
have spangled
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| the
night |
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With
the dust of a myriad worlds, and who speaks in the
thunders
of space;
Though we see not the start or the finish, though
vainly we cry for the
light,
Let us mount in the glory of manhood
and meet the God-Man
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to face. [Page 35] |
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