EDISON by PERCY MACKAYE

A thousand leagues on the Arctic sea
A ship went down through the frozen floe.
Captain and crew they watched her go:
They ran her colors free;
They cheered her lustily;
And far peoples shouted her praise with them
Where a phonograph from her plunging stem
Pealed to the stars her requiem.

A thousand leagues through the Afric wood
A man went looting the jungle's wealth.
Leopard nor lion could stay his stealth,
Nor sleeping-death, nor flood:
He drew not the monsters' blood,
But he led them alive through the scorching day
By a tape of moving film, to play
With the wondering children of Broadway.

A thousand leagues or a thousand years
Are motes in the gaze of the seeking mind:
By its own radiance thought can find
Its way to ultimate spheres,
Dark, till its beam appears
To blazon them. So on that beam hath run
Round Arctic moon and Afric sun
The electric mind of Edison.

Through delicate engine and disk and reel
He quickens the elemental Cause,
Kindling the lightnings of its laws
Till atoms of jelly and steel
Are made to stir and feel,
And mortals that long have ceased to be
Live on, for the world to hear and see,
In a semblance of immortality.

The throbbing ticker resounds his fame
With its ominous pulse, and the mart responds,
Selling his magic in stocks and bonds;
But they, who toss his name
With gold in their mighty game,
Behold not the soul of the mightier One
Who sits in the brain of an Edison
And weighs the dreams, when all is done.

For all that the millions sell and buy
And wrangle for, is a dreamful thing
Wrought of a lone imagining:
Tower'd cities, that top our sky,
Loomed first on the pensive eye
Of brooding architects; the glories
Of art and science, their sounding stories,
Have birth from silent laboratories.

So out of his visioning silences
The great inventor reveals to us
New pathways of nature, perilous
With unknown skies and seas,
For new astronomies
To chart, and each dim discovered trail
Is lit by the gleam of a lurid grail
With the legend: What shall the search avail?

What at last shall avail our invention? Yea,
What avails our soul its cunning brain
If our paths be hatred, our goal be pain?
Brain searches in cloud and clay,
But our soul must point us the way
Through cloud to a star, through clay to God's breath,
Or else it were wiser to welcome death
On the star-lit road to Nazareth.

But they @3shall@1 avail -- both -- brain and soul;
They avail us now in him who has won
Earth's wondering homage -- Edison:
For his mind has held as its goal
The good of a world made whole,
And his spirit girds it with lightning span --
The planatary American
Whose master-thought is the joy of man.

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