218 EGYPT ELECTRICITY
God hath blessed you with a good name : to be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but to write and read comes by nature.
Much Ado About Nothing. Act III. Sc. 3. L. 13.
Only the refined and delicate pleasures that
spring from research and education can build up
barriers between different ranks.
Oh how our neighbour lifts his nose,
To tell what every schoolboy knows.
Every school-boy knows it.
Of an old tale which every schoolboy knows.
Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sunning;
Around it still the sumachs grow
And blackberry vines are running.
Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education.
EGOTISM (See Self-Love)
EGYPT
Egypt! from whose all dateless tombs arose
Forgotten Pharaohs from their long repose,
And shook within their pyramids to hear
A new Cambyses thundering in their ear;
While the dark shades of forty ages stood
Like startled giants by Nile's famous flood.
And they spoiled the Egyptians.
I am dying, Egypt, dying.
ELECTRICITY
Stretches, for leagues and leagues, the Wire,
A hidden path for a Child of FireOver its silent spaces sent,
Swifter than Ariel ever went,
From continent to continent.
| author= Wm. Henry Burleigh
| work = The Rhyme of the Cable.
}}
{{Hoyt quote
| num = 12
| text = <poem>And fire a mine in China, here
With sympathetic gunpowder.
While Franklin's quiet memory climbs to heaven,
Calming the lightning which he thence hath riven.
And stoic Franklin's energetic shade
Robed in the lightnings which his hand allay'd.
Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.
To put a girdle round about the world.
A vast engine of wonderful delicacy and intricacy, a machine that is like the tools of the
Titans put in your hands. This machinery, in its external fabric so massive and so exquisitely adjusted, and in its internal fabric making new categories of thought, new ways of thinking about life.
Notwithstanding my experiments with electricity the thunderbolt continues to fall under our noses and beards; and as for the tyrant, tyrant, there are a million of us still engaged at snatching away his sceptre.
away his sceptre.
But matchless Franklin! What a few
Can hope to rival such as you.
Who seized from kings their sceptred pride
And turned the lightning's darts aside.
Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by
means of electricity, the world of matter has
become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of
miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the
round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with
intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought,
nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.
A million hearts here wait our call,
All naked to our distant speech—
I wish that I could ring them all
And have some welcome news for each.
An ideal's love-fraught, imperious call
That bids the spheres become articulate.