The New Century's Goddess

She is free from the turbulence that drives the goats of the Alps, but still her soul yearns for the salt of life, as the goats pant for the mountain salt. There is calm in her heart as in the ancient Hebrew songs the voice of the nomad drifts over green pastures beneath starry skies; and yet in song her heart swells mightier than the heart of the inspired warrior from the Thessalonian mountains in the old days of Greece.

How goes it with her Christendom? She has learned the ins and outs of philosophy; the elements broke one of her milk teeth, but a new one grew. While yet in the cradle she ate of the fruit of knowledge and grew wise, so that Immortality flashed forth before her as mankind' s happiest thought.

When begins the New Age of Poesy? When will the Goddess be known? When will she be heard?

On a wonderful spring morning she will come on the locomotive dragon, thundering over bridges and through dark tunnels; or on the back of the puffing dolphin across the calm but surging sea; or high in the air, carried by Montgolfier's bird, Roc, descending in the land where first her God-given voice shall greet the race of man. When? Will she come from the newfound land of Columbus, the land of freedom, where the native is hunted and the African is a beast of burden, the land from where we heard The Song of Hiawatha? Or from the antipodes, that golden nugget in the southern sea, the land of opposites, where our nighttime is their daytime, and where the black swans sing in mossy forests? Or maybe from the land where Memnon' s pillar rings but we never understood the song of the Sphinx in the desert from the isle of the coalpit, where, since the age of the great Elizabeth, Shakespeare has reigned? Or from Tycho Brahe's home, where he wasn't wanted; or from California's fairyland, where the redwood holds high its crown as king of the earth' s forests?

When shall the star be lit, the star on the brow of the Goddess, the flower on whose petals is inscribed the century's ideal of beauty in form, color, and fragrance?