Pale queen of night, fair coquette of the skies,
Thou, who with fickle, sweet inconstancy
Receives the smile from the admiring sun,
And straight transmits it to the sordid earth,—
How many cycles of the silent past
Hast thou beheld the rise and fall of man,
His proud ascendency and swift decline;
His zenith and his pitiful decay;
E'er he emerged from out the dismal cave,
His habitation rude and primitive;
E'er yet the forest trembled at his stroke,
E'er his indenting chisel cleaved the stones
And framed the first crude human domicile?
As time rolled on and human skill advanced
By almost imperceptible degrees
Of slow, experimental tutorage,
Along a nobler, more artistic plane,
He hewed the stones in form of ornament,
Sculptured device of various design,
Embellishment of cunning symmetry,
Man's first attempt to scale the realms of art.
Thou hast beheld him on his suppliant kneel,
Engaged in worship, audible or mute,
Invoking thy protection and thy aid,
Thy gracious favor and beatitude;
With arms outstretched in reverential awe,
Propitiating thee, with fervent prayer
For the remission of thy baleful stroke.
Thou hast beheld his superstitious fear
And heard his curses, and his solemn prayers
As thy dark form eclipsed the smiling sun.
Thou hast beheld him fashion and adorn
The gorgeous altar and the totem pole;
With fervent zeal, and blind simplicity,
From base materials of wood or stone,
Carve out a God, then kneel and worship it.
Thou, too, hast heard the slave-whip's poignant crack,
The sound of avarice and turpitude,
As hands unwilling plied their arduous task,
Creating monuments to iron will,
Human injustice, greed and servitude.
Thou hast beheld him shape the pyramids,
Heap up the mound and build the massive wall,
Create the castle and the towering spire,
The ponderous dome and stately edifice.
From thy observant orbit in the skies,
Did'st thou behold that sacrilegious tower,
Which reared its massive form on Babel's plain,
Built by misguided and presumptuous men,
In vain and ineffectual attempt
To scale the heavens surreptitiously?
E'er the completion of the impious pile,
Thou mayest have heard, with silent nonchalance,
That strange catastrophe of human speech,
That dire confusion of the languages,
Confounding all the tongues and dialects
To unknown chaos of peculiar sounds.
Changing the conversation of the day
To accents strange and unintelligible,
Unlike to common and accepted terms;
To tones mysterious and unnatural,
Conglomerated forms of utterance
Which bore no semblance to the human voice.
Some rent the air with unaccustomed words
Striving in desperation to converse,
With ears which heard, but could not understand.