Man of new wonders ever loves to tell:
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The ship that sails the air; the voice that flies
Across a world, at touching of a bell;
The picture that shall flash for unborn eyes
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The deeds and dances mote-like in the sun
Of us that live now, and so soon are gone—
Each radiant step that from the dark ascends
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The star-lit ladder of the climbing brain;
The patient will that to its purpose bends
The dread immortals to a mortal gain,
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Turning old terrors into magic friends,
Making a toy of thunder . . .
. . . but most my thought
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Ponders on marvels man has half forgot—
The far beginnings of these shining ends;
And, chief of these, when pity first began—
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That strange, far moment when another's woe
Stirred in the brutish clay yet scarcely man,
And the first tear was shed—how long ago!—
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And lips uncouth first stammered love's first word,
Strange as the first far song of the first bird.
Surely it was a woman, as she pressed,
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Unknowing why she loved it, to her breast
The babe so strangely hers, so softly curled
There in her arms; the little flickering flame
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That out of blackness into being came
To her, 'mid all the welter of the world.
And, maybe, looking on her tenderness,
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Man's fierceness stumbled to a rough caress;
Till lo! this marvel through long ages grew—
Man learned a kindness for the thing he slew.
Mother divine! yea, even now as then
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Save us with pity from a world of men;
For, now as then, with war and weeping wild,
Woman has still the whole sad world for child.