Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/413

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Paul.

��397

��coniraitted suicide because they could not square the circle. Flying may yet be the rapid transit for which we sigh, and considered a common-place method of travel. A woman's tongue is now regarded by miserable CN'nics as the nearest approach yet gained to })erpetual motion, but the strides of inventors during the last century have taught us to be surprised at nothing. Did you ever think of the stories which lie hidden in the rejected mod- els of the Patent office? Hawthorne could have made them speak in a way never to be equalled or forgotten, of bitter tears and crushed aspirations and home trials, — like the laboratory of Elsie's father, the most melan- choly place in the world, with its fur- nace, its models, its strange machines. It is like a haunted chamber, haunted

��with the helpless, nameless ghosts of infants that have died at their birth, the ghosts of vain and fruitless projects, like the ruins of a city that some earthquake had destroyed be- fore it was finished, ruined palaces that were never roofed, ruined houses that were never inhabited, ruined churches that were never worshipped in, a museum of equisite models which seem as if they must answer, and yet never do."

That sad-faced, impoverished mul- titude who have staked their all and lost, with whom a possible and glori- ous Perhaps has yielded to a fateful Never, yet whose imperfect plans fur- nish the steps by which others gain the prize and win perpetual fame, — these unsuccessful inventors are the truest martyrs to science.

��PAUL.

By Warren Tilton.

O grandest life ! how pointless seems

The life of these wise modern days, Of skepticism's endless schemes,

Of politicians' devious ways, Compared to thine, Christ-like and given

To move the world with large surprise, Point Jew and Gentile up to heaven,

Through all the years and centuries.

O noblest man ! what puniest men,

Compared to thee, in church and state ! O for a trumpet-voice again

Like thine, to mould, to re-create ! Sad, seer-eyed Samuel gave a king

To appease the people's clamor — Saul ; But what to earth again shall bring

A greater than all kings — a Paul ?

Where is the man who dares to live

In brave contempt of prison, rod. And his last dying record give,

With splendid utterance, up to God In clarion notes like these, — " I 've fought

A good fight and my race is run ; With priceless price I have been bought ;

I 've kept the faith, and heaven is won " ?

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