by John Critchley Prince (uncredited).
Originally published in Household Words (Bradbury & Evans) vol.3 #54 (05 Apr 1851).
I hear men laud the coming Exhibition,
I read its promise in the printed page,
And thence I learn that its pacific mission
Is to inform and dignify the age;
It comes to congregate the alien nations;
In new, but friendly bonds, old foes to bind;
It comes to rouse to nobler emulations
Man's skill of hand, man's energy of mind.
A thousand vessels breasting wind and ocean,
A thousand fire-cars, snorting on their way,
Shall startle London with a strange commotion,
Beneath the genial loveliness of May;
And we shall hail the peaceable invasion
With voice of welcome, cordial grasp of hand,
And, in the grandeur of the great occasion,
See signs of brotherhood 'tween every land.
Would I might walk beneath that dome transcendent,
Than old Alhambra s halls more proudly fair;
Nay, than Aladdin s palace more resplendent,
Bright as if quarried from the fields of air;
Would I might wander in its wondrous mazes,
Filled with embodied thought in every guise;
See Art and Science in their countless phases,
And bless the power that gave them to my eyes.
Men are about me with pale, vacant faces,
Human in shape, in spirit dark and low;
They do not care for Genius and its graces,
Nor understand, nor do they seek to know.
But I had read and pondered; feeling ever
Deep reverence for the lofty, good, and true,
And, therefore, yearn to see this high endeavour
Stand grandly realised before my view.
But what to me are these inspiring changes,
That gorgeous show, that spectacle sublime?
My labour, leagued with poverty, estranges
Me from this mental marvel of our time.
I cannot share the triumph and the pageant,
I, a poor toiler at the whirling wheel,
The slave, not servant, of a ponderous agent,
With bounding steam-pulse, and with arms of steel.
My ears are soothed by no melodious measures,
No work of sculptor charms my longing gaze;
No painter thrills me with exalted pleasures,
But books and thought have cheered my darkest days.
Thank God for Sundays! then impartial nature
Folds me within the shadow of her wings,
And drinking in her every voice and feature,
I feel more reconciled to men and things.
I shall not see our Babel's summer wonder,
Save in the proseman's page, the poet's song,
But I shall hear it in the far-off thunder
Of distant lands, applauding loud and long;
Why should I murmur? I shall share with others
The glorious fruits of that triumphant day:
Hail to the time that makes all nations brothers!
Hail to the advent of the coining May!