write lyrics, Dane Kempton. And I multiplied
myself. I kept hunger afar off, and fire and sword from your habitation,
and the bondsmen in obedience under you. I solved methods of government
and invented systems of jurisprudence. Out of my toil sprang forms and
institutions. You sang of them and were the slave of them, but I was the
maker of them and the changer of them.

You worshipped at the shrine of the idea. I sought the fact and the law
behind the fact. I was the worker and maker and liberator. You were
conventional. Tradition bound you. You were full bellied and content,
and you sang of the things that were. You were mastered by dogma. Did
the Mediaeval Church say the earth was flat, you sang of an earth that
was flat, and danced and made your little shows on an earth that was
flat. And you helped to bind me with chains and burn me with fire when
my facts and the laws behind my facts shook your dogmas. Dante's highest
audacity could not transcend a material inferno. Milton could not shake
off Lucifer and hell.

You were more beautiful. But not only was I more useful, but I made the
way for you that there might be greater beauty. You did not reck of
that. To you the heart was the seat of the emotions. I formulated the
circulation of the blood. You gave charms and indulgences to the world;
I gave it medicine and surgery. To you, famine and pestilence were acts
of providence and punishment of sin: I made the world a granary and
drained its cities. To you the mass of the people were poor lost
wretches who would be rewarded in paradise or baked in hell. You could
offer them no earthly happiness of decency. Forsooth, beggars as well as
kings were of divine right. But I shattered the royal prerogatives and
overturned the thrones of the one and lifted the other somewhat out of
the dirt.

Nor is my work done. With my inventions and discoveries and rational
enterprise, I draw the world together and make it kin. The uplift is but
begun. And in the great world I am making I shall be as of old to you,
Dane. I, who have made you and freed you, shall give you space and
greater freedom. And, as of old, we shall quarrel as when first you came
to me and found me at my rude earth-work. You shall be the scorner of
matter, and I the master of matter. You may laugh at me and my work, but
you shall not be absent from the feast nor shall your voice be silent.
For, when I have conquered the globe, and enthralled the elements, and
harn