THE PASSING SHOW.
I.
I know not if it was a dream. I viewed
A city where the restless multitude,
Between the eastern and the
western deep
Had roared gigantic fabrics, strong and
rude.
Colossal palaces crowned every height;
Towers from valleys climbed into the light;
O’er dwellings at their
feet, great golden domes
Hung in the blue, barbarically bright.
But now, new-glimmering to-east, the day
Touched the black masses with a grace
of gray,
Dim spires of temples to the
nation’s God
Studding high spaces of the wide survey.
Well did the roofs their solemn secret
keep
Of life and death stayed by the truce
of sleep,
Yet whispered of an hour-when
sleepers wake,
The fool to hope afresh, the wise to weep.
The gardens greened upon the builded hills
Above the tethered thunders of the mills
With sleeping wheels unstirred
to service yet
By the tamed torrents and the quickened
rills.
A hewn acclivity, reprieved a space,
Looked on the builder’s blocks about
his base
And bared his wounded breast
in sign to say:
“Strike! ’t is my destiny
to lodge your race.
“’T was but a breath ago the
mammoth browsed
Upon my slopes, and in my caves I housed
Your shaggy fathers in their
nakedness,
While on their foeman’s offal they
caroused.”
Ships from afar afforested the bay.
Within their huge and chambered bodies
lay
The wealth of continents;
and merrily sailed
The hardy argosies to far Cathay.
Beside the city of the living spread—
Strange fellowship!—the city
of the dead;
And much I wondered what its
humble folk,
To see how bravely they were housed, had
said.
Noting how firm their habitations stood,
Broad-based and free of perishable wood—
How deep in granite and how
high in brass
The names were wrought of eminent and
good,
I said: “When gold or power
is their aim,
The smile of beauty or the wage of shame,
Men dwell in cities; to this
place they fare
When they would conquer an abiding fame.”
From the red East the sun—a
solemn rite—
Crowned with a flame the cross upon a
height
Above the dead; and then with
all his strength
Struck the great city all aroar with light!
II.
I know not if it was a dream. I came
Unto a land where something seemed the
same
That I had known as ’t
were but yesterday,
But what it was I could not rightly name.
It was a strange and melancholy land.
Silent and desolate. On either hand
Lay waters of a sea that seemed
as dead,
And dead above it seemed the hills to
stand,
Grayed all with age, those lonely hills—ah
me,
How worn and weary they appeared to be!
Between their feet long dusty
fissures clove
The plain in aimless windings to the sea.