t round us rise in grim array,
Darkening the meridian day:
Bigotry, whose chief employ
Is embittering earthly joy;
Chaos, throned in pedant state,
Teaching echo how to prate;
And 'Ignorance, with looks profound,'
Not 'with eye that loves the ground,'
But stalking wide, with lofty crest,
In science's pretentious vest.

And now, great masters of the realms of shade,
To end the task which called us down from air,
We shall present, in pictured show arrayed,
Of this your modern world the triumphs rare,

That Gryllus's benighted spirit
May wake to your transcendent merit,
And, with profoundest admiration thrilled,
He may with willing mind assume his place
In your steam-nursed, steam-borne, steam-killed,
And gas-enlightened race.

CIRCE
Speak, Gryllus, what you see,

I see the ocean,
And o'er its face ships passing wide and far;
Some with expanded sails before the breeze,
And some with neither sails nor oars, impelled
By some invisible power against the wind,
Scattering the spray before them, But of many
One is on fire, and one has struck on rocks
And melted in the waves like fallen snow.
Two crash together in the middle sea,
And go to pieces on the instant, leaving
No soul to tell the tale, and one is hurled
In fragments to the sky, strewing the deep
With death and wreck. I had rather live with Circe
Even as I was, than flit about the world
In those enchanted ships which some Alastor
Must have devised as traps for mortal ruin.

Look yet again.

Now the whole scene is changed.
I see long chains of strange machines on wheels,
With one in front of each, purring white smoke
From a black hollow column. Fast and far
They speed, like yellow leaves before the gale,
When autumn winds are strongest. Through their windows
I judge them thronged with people; but distinctly
Their speed forbids my seeing.

SPIRIT-RAPPER
This is one
Of the great glories of our modern time,
* Men are become as birds,' and skim like swallows
The surface of the world.

GRYLLUS
For what good end?

SPIRIT-RAPPER
The end is in itself--the end of skimming
The surface of the world.

GRYLLUS
If that be all,
I had rather sit in peace in my old hom