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,