Conquest of the Air.

Some creep on the earth, some walk, some fly;
O blest to heaven are those with wings!
So spake the ancients, and raised to the sky
Their eyes, impatient of feathered things.

So they winged a steed in their fancy's dream;
But he shook his weakling rider off,
And his red eyes shone with the stars that teem,
Like red wine shining they could no quaff.

The myth is the shell of a living thought,
Pegasus such, or Icarus bold.
And now men have reached the goal that they sought,
And lie as serene on the cloud as the wold.

Have ye gained so much in your wild-bird flight?
Have ye quarried the fluttering stars in their fields?
Or but petty spurners of Earth, delight
In defying her motherly rule, which yields?

What see ye else from your lordly height
Than the Earth, like Lilliput's garden, fly;
The back of a slumbering cloud in sight,
With his head new crowned in the sunrise sky,
And his tattered robe whipped by the wind passing by?

—J.T.