No lifeless thing of iron and stone,
But sentient, as her children are,
Nature accepts you for her own,
Kin to the cataract and the star.
She marks your vast, sufficing plan,
Cable and girder, bolt and rod,
And takes you, from the hand of man,
For some new handiwork of God.
You thrill through all your chords of steel
Responsive to the living sun;
And quickening in your nerves you feel
Life with its conscious currents run.
Your anchorage upbears the march
Of time and the eternal powers.
The sky admits your perfect arch,
The rock respects your stable towers.
Charles G. D. Roberts.
The first week in September, 1886, a destructive earthquake shook the eastern portion of the United States, Charleston, S. C., suffering a tremendous shock which snuffed out scores of lives and rendered seven eighths of the houses unfit for habitation.
CHARLESTON
1886
Is this the price of beauty! Fairest, thou,
Of all the cities of the sunrise sea,
Yet thrice art stricken. First, war harried thee;
Then the dread circling tempest drove its plough
Right through thy palaces; and now, O now!
A sound of terror, and thy children flee
Into the night and death. O Deity!
Thou God of war and whirlwind, whose dark brow,
Frowning, makes tremble sea and solid land!
These are thy creatures who to heaven cry
While hell roars 'neath them, and its portals ope;
To thee they call,—to thee who bidst them die,
Who hast forgotten to withhold thy hand,—
For thou, Destroyer, art man's only Hope!
Richard Watson Gilder.