FAMILY OF THE EPHEMERA.
(To be read in connection with the following poem, “Shut In.”)
Somewhere, sometime, I know not when or where, I have heard a strangely beautiful and beautifully strange and altogether wonderful story—a story of a pygmy people.
In the long, long ago that has slipped into the lethal tide of the flow of Time where even the years have forgotten the rolling chime that they used to sing to the shore of a heavenly clime (and where poets don’t ever, nor ever, nor ever rhyme), whence even Tradition, asleep, forgets to climb, so long ago that I don’t know but that the time still antedates all dates, there lived the Family of the Ephemera.
As the sun came up in the morning, the race came into existence. During the night, a toad-stool of wonderful dimensions had sprung up, and beneath this over-shadowing phenomenon, built by the genii of darkness, the first glint of the new day’s sun kissed the first born of a new race—the Adam and Eve of the Family called Ephemera.
As the sun arose, and ere, e’en years ere it showed its lower disk, the family increased most startingly. The whole of their known world was peopled. They developed the resources of their vast little land. They cultivated the soil. They delved in the mines for gold. They carried on commerce with their widely scattered selves. They built homes and cities. Their cities were magnificent, their houses built of exquisitely carved and polished stone quarried from a grain of sand. Each window was made of the filmy iridescence of a single sunbeam, and curtained with richly embroidered tapestries woven from threads of the delicate shadow cast by a single ray of spectral purple. Their tables were filled with all the rich and dainty micros of the land. Withal, they were a happy, though barbarous people.
The sun arose. Men of the present generation had already grown gray-headed, while myriads of their posterity were just starting on their paths. Generation after generation had already come and gone, each leaving the wealth of its history, its experience, its scientific researches, its learning to the inheritants of the next.
Centuries to them came and went, governments grew old, decayed, and passed into tradition, while others sprang up in their places;—for to this strange and fast-living people, our moments were days, our seconds were months, our minutes were years, our hours were centuries, and our days were ages untold that lap the two ends of time into one unbroken eternity.
The sun was mid-forenoon. The Family of the Ephemera had grown old and wise. They pointed with vaunting pride to their intelligence and prosperity, to their grand achievements reaching down the long, fretted colonnades of history and vanishing in the dim perspective of tradition’s mystery. They looked upon all around, beneath, and above them, and rejoiced that all was for them. Their wise philosophers pointed to the sun and said, “All for us!” They told and taught how that great sun had always remained in its present place; for even in the memory of the oldest inhabitants no one had ever known the sun to be in other place than now. Nay, even history knew it not. They said, however, that there was a tradition, but not authenticated by history nor by later scientific investigation, that the sun long, long æons ago had occupied a position nearer the horizon. They showed how and why all things were made for them; how the great toad-stool, towering an immeasurable distance above them, had been placed on earth for them, and them alone, and philosophized how it was impossible for another to exist in the universe. They rejoiced that their little world was created, and endowed with all its richest blessings, for none other than them. They were a happy people, and prosperous. Their want of wisdom made them more happy and more prosperous.
Centuries came and went. The sun stood in the zenith. So stood the race of Ephemera. Wiser philosophers than those of the mid-forenoon of their existence still pointed toward the great red sun, and said, “It was always there; it was made for us!” Crowns crumbled. New nations arose as from chaos, flourished, and died. Others took their places. Schools had always been tolerated. They were now fostered. They pointed their telescopes toward the mighty fret-work of the toad-stool above them, and computed the number of huge radial beams that supported its broad outer rim. The students of the universities and colleges delved deep into the lore of their ancestral nations. They studied history; they read their poets; they reasoned and computed with their mathematicians; they looked down into the earth and up into the heavens with their philosophers, and, withdrawing to their own narrow cells, they said, “All for us, all for us!”
The sun passed the zenith, declining to the west. The race declined! Still, philosophers said, pointing to the sun, “’Twas alway thus; ’twas made for us!”
They said Time was for them, and them alone. They could not conceive another similar or a different people. With prophecy, they looked into the future. They claimed that, also: for a hope and a faith, placed in their hearts at their creation, had grown and strengthened, that they should all meet again in another world, a brighter and a better world, all for them, all for them. The gods, with whom they peopled all things, watched over and guarded them, and them alone.
The sun sank low. The lower limb touched the horizon. With the going down of the sun, the race decayed in its old age. As the last ray of sun passed over the land of the Ephemera, only two of this strange Family, wandering hand in hand, old and lone, turned their eyes to the waning light of the west, and sank to rest as the ray shot up and out into the unfathomed sky beyond, and glinted its gold on the clinking stars, the beautiful golden gates of the sable and iron-bound night!
Thus passed away the Family of the Ephemera. Strange, strange story! A race wrapped up in themselves, never dreaming that there might be innumerable other realms like their little own; that there might be peoples on peoples beyond their ken in worlds unknown as superior to them as the gods of Olympus were superior to the Romans.
A strange, strange story!—for we are looking through an inverted microscope, the large end at the eye, and the small end turned upon Time, Events, and the Human race!
SHUT IN.
I.
Oh the narrowness man has been born to descry in,
Where the convex surface of every eye,
Even unto the night of the day we shall die in,
Still perfectly fits in the concave sky!