Gloria Mundi

Magician hands through long, laborious nightsHave made these princely palaces to loomWhiter than are the city’s legion lights,On threads unseen stretched out across the gloom.Reared in an hour, for one brief hour to reign,The proud pavilions watchful hold in feeA world’s achievements, where the stately SeineSlides slowly past her bridges to the sea.

Mute and memorial, as on either bankShe sees the marvel worked before her eyes,Beholds as in a vision, rank on rank.Pagoda, dome, and campanile rise,Like to a mother scowling on a childSceptred and crowned to make a queen of May,The Seine, that sorrowed not for France defiled,Past France triumphant frowning goes her way.

Yet, dragged reluctant from these ransomed shores,Upon her tide, that sullenly and slowCreeps channelward, the unapparent scoresOf history’s spectres disregarded go;And as the Empress City gains the seatOf that imperial throne to which at lastBy devious ways she comes, beneath her feetThe Seine in silence blots away the past.

Blots out the warning of cathedral bells,The night of snowy scarfs, of swords, of staves,The muffled bass of tumbril wheels that tellsOf mortal men that dig immortal graves;Blots out the faces, calmly unafraid.Of prince and peasant, courtesan and queen.When men made martyrs and were martyrs made,When France meant Hell and God meant Guillotine!

Like pilgrims whom a holy city calls,The peoples bring their miracles to her;The world of peace lays down within her wallsIts gifts of gold, and frankincense, and myrrh:The West, wide-eyed, alert, intrepid, young,With rush of shuttles and the song of steam;The East, that, lotus-eating, gropes amongThe half-remembered fragments of her dream.

From minarets the muezzins call to prayer,From violins the mad mazurkas rise,And western rangers watch in wonder, whereThe camel boy his listless lash applies:And nations warring, or that late have warred,Their feuds forgot, their battles under ban,Proclaim above the clamor of the swordThe pæan of the mastery of man.

Man! Born to grovel in a squalid cave,Whose hand it is that every door unbars.Whose cables cleave three thousand miles of wave,Whose lenses tear their secrets from the stars!Man! Naked, dull, unarmed, barbaric, dumb,What magic path is this that he had trod?Through what refining furnace hath he come,This demi-brute become a demi-god?

As some great river merges every songOf tributary waters in its own,To blend in turn its music in the strongFull measure of the ocean’s monotone—So this triumphant anthem, skyward sentMan’s marvellous finale to presage,Within its thunderous diapason blent,The keynote holds of each succeeding age!

For here the whip-lash sings above the slavesWho bend despairing to the galley’s oars;The hoarse hail rings, across the sunlit waves,Of vikings bound to unexploited shores:Here is the chant of ransomed Israel’s joy,The moan of Egypt stricken in her home,The challenge of the Grecian host to Troy,The shout of Huns before the gates of Rome:

The oaths of sailors on the galleon’s decks,The welcome of Columbus to the land,The prayers upon the doomed Armada’s wrecks,The rallying cry of Braddock’s final stand;Trafalgar’s cannon, and the bugle’s callsWhere France’s armies thread the Alpine gorge,The Campbell’s pipes heard near to Lucknow’s walls,The patriot’s hymn that hallowed Valley Forge!

All, all are here! The feeble and the strong;The spoiled beside the victors of the spoilOf twenty centuries swell the sacred songOf human triumph won by human toil!Up and yet upward to the heaven’s wide archThe thunders of the great thanksgiving rollTo mark the way of that majestic marchOf mortal man toward his Maker’s goal!

And while the echo of her folly dies,As in the hills the sound of village bells,Upward from Paris to the April skiesHer hymn of rehabilitation swells;From dark to dawn, from weakness back to strength,The pendulum majestically swings,And o’er the ashes of her past at lengthThe phœnix of her future spreads its wings!