A WONDERFUL POEM.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XLV, Issue 11990, 29 January 1920, Page 2

A WONDERFUL POEM.

(By Famous American Journalist). The author of the subjoined poem (Mr Langdon Smith) was employed on the Sunday edition of the New York Herald, and while so engaged in 1865 wrote the first few stanzas, and got them printed in the Herald. Four years later, having joined the staff of the New York Journal in the interim, Mr Smith Hound the verses among his papers, and, reading them over, was struck with a sense of their incompleteness. He added a stanza, or two, and laid the poem aside. Later ho wrote more stanzas, and finally completed it and sent it in to Mr Arthur Brisbane, editor of the Evening Journal. Mr Brisbane, being unable to use it, turned it over to Mr O. E. Russell, of the Morning Journal. It appeared in the Morning Journal—-in the middle of a page of want adverfcisements. Even so, Mr Smith received . letters of congratulation from all parts of the world, along with requests for copies. The poem has been in sonstant demand ever since.— When you were a tadpole and I was a fish, In the Paleozoic time, And side by tide on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and the slime, Or skittered with many a ca udal flip _ Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, Mv heart was rife with the joy of life, For 1 loved you even then. Mindless we lived and mindless we loved, And mindless at last we died; And deep in a rift of the Oaradoc drift We slumbered aide by side. The world turned on in the lathe of time, The hot lands heaved amain, Till we caught our breath from the womb of death And crept into light again. Wo were Amphibians, scaled and tailed, And drab as a dead man’s hand; We coiled at ease ’neath the dripping Or trailed through the mud and sand. Croaking and blind, with our threeclawed feet, Writing a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a life to come.

Yet happy we lived, and happy we loved. And happy we died once more; Our forma were rolled in the clinging mnd Of a .Neocomian shore. The eons came and the eons’ sway And the sleep that wrapped us last Was riven away in a newer day, And the night of death was past. When light and swift through the jangle trees, We swung in our airy flights, Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms - In the hush of the moonless nights. And oh ! what beautiful years wore When our hearts clung each to each ; When life was filled and our senses thrilled In the first faint dawn of speech.

Tnns life by life, and lore by love, We passed through the cycles strange, And breath by breath, and death by death Wo followed the chain of change, Till there came a time in the law of life When ever the nursing sod The shadows broke, and the soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God.

I was thewed like an Aurocb bull, And tusked like the great Gave Bear; And j'on, my sweet, from head to feet,. Were gowned in your glorious hair. Deep in the gloom of a tireless cave, When the night fell o’er the plain, And the moon hung red o’er the river bed, We mumbled the bones of the slain.

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge, And shaped it with brutish craft; I broke a shank from the woodland dank, And fitted it, head and haft. Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn, Where the Mammoth came to drink; Though brawn and bone I drave the stone, And slew him upon the brink.

Loud I bowled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin; From West to east to the crimson feast The clan came trooping in. O’er joint and gristle and padded hoof We fought, and clawed, and tore. And cheek by jowl, with many a growl, We talked the marvel o’er.

I carved that fight on a reindeer bone With rude and hairy hand, I pictured his fall on the cavern wall, That men might understand, For wo lived by blood and the right of might Ere human laws were drawn, And the Age of Sin did not begin Till our brutal tusks were gone.

And that was a million years ago, In a time that no man knows; Yet here to-night, in the yellow light, We sit at Dolmonico’s. Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs, Your hair is as dark as jet; Your years are few, your life is new, Your soul untried, and yet ——

Our trail is on the Kimeridge clay, And the scrap of the Purbeck flags, We have loft our bones in the Bagshot stones, And deep in the Coraline crags. Our love is old, our lives are old, And death shall come amain ; Should it come to-day, what man may say We shall not live again V

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds, And tarnished them wings to fly ; He sowed oar spawn in the world’s dim dawn, And I know that it shall Tnot die, Though cities have sprung above the graves Where the crook-boned men made war,

And the ox- wain creaks o’er theburied caves - Where the mummied mammoths , are. Then as we linger at luncheon here O’er many a dainty dish, Let us drink anew; to time when you Were a Tadpole and I was a Pish.