With ductile fire.  Loud, exulting cries
From boat to boat, and to the echoes round,
Greet the glad miracle.  Thought’s new-found path
Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways,
Match God’s equator with a zone of art,
And lift man’s public action to a height
Worthy the enormous clouds of witnesses,
When linked hemispheres attest his deed. 
We have few moments in the longest life
Of such delight and wonder as there grew,—­
Nor yet unsuited to that solitude: 
A burst of joy, as if we told the fact
To ears intelligent; as if gray rock
And cedar grove and cliff and lake should know
This feat of wit, this triumph of mankind;
As if we men were talking in a vein
Of sympathy so large, that ours was theirs,
And a prime end of the most subtle element
Were fairly reached at last.  Wake, echoing caves! 
Bend nearer, faint day-moon!  Yon thundertops,
Let them hear well! ’t is theirs as much as ours.

A spasm throbbing through the pedestals
Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent,
Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill
To be a brain, or serve the brain of man. 
The lightning has run masterless too long;
He must to school, and learn his verb and noun,
And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage,
Spelling with guided tongue man’s messages
Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea. 
And yet I marked, even in the manly joy
Of our great-hearted Doctor in his boat,
(Perchance I erred,) a shade of discontent;
Or was it for mankind a generous shame,
As of a luck not quite legitimate,
Since fortune snatched from wit the lion’s part? 
Was it a college pique of town and gown,
As one within whose memory it burned
That not academicians, but some lout,
Found ten years since the Californian gold? 
And now, again, a hungry company
Of traders, led by corporate sons of trade,
Perversely borrowing from the shop the tools
Of science, not from the philosophers,
Had won the brightest laurel of all time. 
’Twas always thus, and will be; hand and head
Are ever rivals:  but, though this be swift,
The other slow,—­this the Prometheus,
And that the Jove,—­yet, howsoever hid,
It was from Jove the other stole his fire,
And, without Jove, the good had never been. 
It is not Iroquois or cannibals,
But ever the free race with front sublime,
And these instructed by their wisest too,
Who do the feat, and lift humanity. 
Let not him mourn who best entitled was,
Nay, mourn not one:  let him exult,
Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples, plant,
And water it with wine, nor watch askance
Whether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit: 
Enough that mankind eat, and are refreshed.