Devotions, manners, hopes that were,
Ideals high, traditions fine,
Were felt to culminate in her,
The efflorescence of her line.
What time and cost conspired to trace
Her lineaments of perfect grace!
IN WAREHOUSE AND OFFICE.
How can the man whose uneventful days,
Each like the other, are obscurely spent
Amid the mill's dead products, keep his gaze
Upon a lofty goal serenely bent?
Or he who sedulously tells and groups
Their minted shadows with deft finger-tips?
Or who above the shadow's shadow stoops,
And dips his pen and writes, and writes and dips?
How can he? Yet some such have been and are,
Prophets and seers in deed, if not in word,
And poets of a faery land afar,
By incommunicable music stirred;
Feasting the soul apart with what it craves,
Their occupation's masters, not its slaves.
H. M. S. "DREADNOUGHT."
Titanic craft of many thousand tons,
A smaller Britain free to come and go,
Relying on thy ten terrific guns
To daunt afar the most presumptuous foe;
Thick-panoplied with plates of hardened steel,
Equipped with all the engin'ry of death,
Unrivalled swiftness in thy massive keel,
Annihilation latent in thy breath.
"Dreadnought" thy name. And yet, for all thy size
And strength, the ocean might engulf thy prow,
Or the swift red torpedo of the skies,
The lightning, blast thy boast-emblazoned brow;
Thou hast thy use, but Britain's sons were wise
To put their trust in better things than thou.