Blessing them under the sun!

"This is Earth's pulse of high health
Thrilling with vigour and heat,
Brotherhood, wisdom and wealth,
Throbbing in every beat;
But you must watch in good sooth
Lest to false fever it swerve,--
Touch it with tenderest truth
As the world's exquisite nerve!

"Let the first message across--
High-hearted Commerce, give heed--
Not be of profit or loss,
But one electric indeed:
Praise to the Giver be given,
For that He giveth man skill,
Glory to God in the Heaven!
'Peace upon earth, and goodwill!'"

Another Electric poem of mine called "The First Message," also in Gall's
edition, was sent over by telegraph to America. What a miserable muddle,
by the way, those meddlesome revisers have made of The Angel's
Message;--preferring a dubious sigma to a comma, they have utterly
spoilt that sublime trilogy by making "Peace upon earth, goodwill
towards men," read "Peace upon earth among men in whom he is well
pleased." How clumsy and how ungrammatical, _in_ whom! The whole dear
Bible has been terribly damaged by their 36,000 needless alterations in
the New Testament (not 100 having been really necessary), and I know not
how many more myriads in the Old, but happily their Version falls dead,
and will soon be as forgotten as Dr. Conquest's "Bible with 20,000
emendations," whereof I now possess a somewhat scarce copy in the
library at Albury. I have less than no patience with those principally
clerical revisers; albeit for their chairman, Dr. Ellicott, I retain a
pleasant memory from Orkney recollections in old days.

* * * * *

But this is a digression, wrung from me by my righteous wrath against
those who have done their worst to spoil for us The Angel's Message, the
first word uttered by the telegraphic wire under the sea.

Returning to the subject of Electrics I have something of interest to
say which will be news to my readers. One day when casually dipping into
Addison's _Spectator_ at Albury, I made the following discovery which I
recorded in the newspapers at the time, and give the extract now fully
as thus:--

In the 241st No. of Addison's _Spectator_, bearing date Thursday,
December 6th, 1711, and as signed "C." (one of the letters of the mystic
Clio), by the great Joseph Addison himself, occurs the following
remarkable anticipation of our presumably most modern discovery. Thos