Well done, master-minded builders.
For the world mind, geographically at least, it has conquered!
And through this miracle of color companioning the hosts of the nations about the universe's court,
With a modern Prometheus banishing the night,
You are radiating the contagion of the triumph to the land and the sea.
For looking southward in a vision—
The architects and sculptors have seen the first rush of the hemispheric waters, victoriously intermingling.
And lo, the inspiration of an isthmian genius has here become the inspiration and joy of a race.
* * * * *
And the races—
Hear the dialects, see the people—
Now catching the world thought they hunger for brotherhood.
And even while they laugh for brotherhood they pray
For they are groping
And inaudibly they are praying for more planetary builders,
To express the growing consciousness of the international mind,
As here materially in stone and in mortar,
So invisibly in governments and a new world order,
And in a brotherhood, large minded and interracial in its scope.
* * * * *
And we believe
That the God of the United Seas will hear their petition in His way.
For as intently we gaze, we can see
That this apocalypse of light and color, directing upward and sympathizing throng-ward
Prophesies that the races are divinely to be led into essential unity.
* * * * *
And even more, O path-finders![B]
We seem to see, the very pillars—emblematic of a holy shaft of light—gathering here.
Radiating not only towards the skys;
But also hovering, hovering, hovering, as if preparing, when the festive days are o'er.
To guide to democracy's sacred task across the highways of the seas.
THE VOICES OF TWO CITIES
Two cities on the Western coast are heralding to the world the triumphant completion of the Panama canal. And if a certain writer is right in saying that there are seven wonders of the modern world—telephone, wireless, aeroplane, radium, and antisceptics and antitoxins, spectrum analysis and X-rays—as there were seven wonders of the ancient world, we can well add that the Panama canal is the eighth modern wonder and that it is the wonder of all wonders, ancient and modern.