The provident maguey, whose offered alms
Found ready acceptation at their hands,
The maize, which they had known in northern lands,
Were native to her rich and virgin soil
And gave the husbandman unstinted spoil.

And thus, with Nature and themselves at rest,
Fresh inspiration from the God of peace
Expands and energizes every breast,
And fettered manhood labors for release.
Invention is emancipation: Time
Doth loosen Nature's fetters; man invents
Not one of those discoveries sublime
That couples his poor name with consequence.
The world had moved a million years or so
Ere Galileo blundered into prison
For telling how we are compelled to go.
The fog of superstition had not risen;
And he whose brain peered up above the cloud,
To widen the horizon of his thought,
Must be content to leave the gnarlish crowd
Of puppets and of priestcraft who have fought
The van of progress, immemorial time,
In fear some newly loosened truth might break
Some preconcerted dogma, deeming crime
The impulsive movement of the soul to slake
The thirst that God implanted there, to burn
Its way into the hidden and unseen,
And find new thoroughfares for its return,
And on creation's outer verge new entities to glean.
So did these primal pioneers look out
Beyond the compass of their husbandry,
And challenge their surroundings; manly, stout,
And earnest did they seek the mystic tree
Of knowledge in this Eden of the West,
Not interdicted by Divine decree,
But always open to the manly quest
And the unflagging purpose to be free.
The zodiac gave up its lettered scroll
To their inquiries; and the measured year
Unsealed the clasp that held it from control,
And truths that had seemed very far, revealed themselves
quite near.

Their rudely fashioned lodges soon gave way
To buildings of a more pretentious form;
The forests and the quarries and the clay
Were forced to human vassalage. The charm
That held the forest templary from spoil
Was not