Teacher Progressive, The

Armed with the weapons time and toll have wrought,
Annealed in centuries of consuming thought,
The slow results of daring search and guess,
Didactic failure and divine success,
The Teacher leaves the world’s gray dawn behind
And boldly sounds the forward march of mind.
Not now to dwell in ruins of the old,
He rakes their ashes and disturbs their mould,
Reads arrowy signs from Nimrod’s temple aisle,
Unwraps the long-tanned mummies of the Nile,
Tracks through Pompeii’s palace-hall and street
The car’s stone groove and tread of sandalled feet;
Far better homes the bright green present yields,
Made sweet with incense of our clover-fields;
And nobler temples and diviner shrines
Gleam where our sun on spire and bell-tower shines.
But from the Past he wrings reluctant lore
To light the paths that open far before;
Beacons the rocks with phosphorescent fire
From bones of crumpled empires, from the mire
Of rank Campagna’s feeds the glowing throat
Of engines almost wise enough to vote;
And like the Vestal Nature when she burns
In tulip flames and lily’s fragrant urns;
The gray dead things of winter, his clear brain
Consumes old husks to cherish the new grain.
“Stand and deliver,” is the hail he gives
To all that was or is, that lived or lives;
Nubia and Luxor, from their giant mass,
May yield one atom for his chemic glass,
One vital fact from all their dusty lees,
The mummy-wheat of thirty centuries, –
That in his garden into new life fed,
May grow to feed the hungry soul with bread.
Old Greece will give him, what all time will guard,
The tragic Muse and Scio’s sightless Bard;
Rome lend a sparkle of heroic fire,
With silvery music of her Mantuan lyre.

And the dead nations from their funeral urn
Shall teach the lesson that they would not learn,
That men are brothers, and they build to fall
In hopeless ruin who build not for all;
That life is progress, and her true souls march
Abreast with Time through his triumphal arch,
And realms that falsely move, or idly wait,
Are ground to powder by an iron fate.

With pick and hammer, and an eye that knows
Life’s lightest foot print in the rock, he goes
Into a past that makes the long array
Of buried realms the infants of to-day,
Among gigantic bones in ruin hurled,
The wallowing monsters of a seething world,
Primeval pines and plumes of palmy fern,
The old flames fixed, that loosened still will burn;
The long procession of ascending lives
From starry forms that multiply their fives,
Through jointed rings, through shells aglow with hints
Of life’s great sunrise in their roseate tints,
To the last form, predicted from the first,
That stands erect, the flower of soul, full burst, –
Finding the same great lesson, God in all,
And life forever onward! To his call
The recluse, Darkness, renders up her keys,
And tongueless Death his rock-bound mysteries.
Then when the past, condensed in one quick word,
Has lent what fire its bounding pulses stirred,
He waves it back into its silent grave,
Rich with the worth of warning which it gave,
And makes the living Present the free heir
Of all his wealth uncumbered with its care.