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Across the Silver Waters there was sign of neither Web of Rainbows nor colossal pillars nor the templed lips that I had seen curving out beneath the Veil when the Shining One had swirled out to greet its priestess and its voice and to dance with the sacrifices. There was but a broken and rent mass of the radiant cliffs against whose base the lake lapped. Long I looked and turned away saddened.
With your mighty sword arm you may yet win to the Golden Cliffs and the templed gardens of the Holy Therns. There tell your story to Matai Shang, my father. He will keep you, and together you may find a way to rescue me. Fly while there is yet a bare chance for flight."
One prisoner of fifteen years had scratched verses upon his walls, and brief prose sentences brief, but full of pathos. These spoke not of himself and his hard estate, but only of the shrine where his spirit fled the prison to worship of home and the idols that were templed there. He never lived to see them.
As on many and many another night of summers past, the moon came up and stood over the Lido, striking far across the glittering lagoon, and everywhere winning the flattered eye to the dark masses of shadow upon the water; to the trees of the Gardens, to the trees and towers and domes of the cloistered and templed isles.
Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens' quartz, with gold wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair of bead moccasins, from uncle who crossed the Plains; three 'alum' baskets of various colors being skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in the rock-candy style works of art which were achieved by the young ladies; their doubles and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots in the land; convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment drops its under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit limbs and features merged together, not strongly defined; pewter presidential-campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer, to be attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat; small Napoleon, done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes of dim children, parents, cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudes but customary ones; no templed portico at back, and manufactured landscape stretching away in the distance that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague figures lavishly chained and ringed metal indicated and secured from doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze; all of them too much combed, too much fixed up; and all of them uncomfortable in inflexible Sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectator cannot realize could ever have been in fashion; husband and wife generally grouped together husband sitting, wife standing, with hand on his shoulder and both preserving, all these fading years, some traceable effect of the daguerreotypist's brisk 'Now smile, if you please! Bracketed over what-not place of special sacredness an outrage in water-color, done by the young niece that came on a visit long ago, and died.
"Have you ever reflected, either of you," she observed, "that we know nothing of this great land of ours? That we sing of loving 'thy rocks and rills, thy woods and templed hills' although the word 'templed' savors of paganism and does not belong in a national hymn? And that it is all balderdash?"
The Czar of all the Russias did as large a thing once as this last, in the reconstruction of a palace. Perhaps the building is insured for its positive value, and the insurance money would erect a better one. But lift an axe upon that tall centurion of these templed elms. Cut through the closely-grained rings that register each succeeding year of two centuries.
There was, however, something so curiously exotic that for a moment it seemed irresistibly funny, in "The Old Oaken Bucket," from lips that have difficulty with the vowel sounds of English; from children that never saw a well and never will see one; and I was irreverent enough to have much the same feeling about "I love thy templed hills," etc., in that patriotic Plymouth Rock song which is so little adapted for universal American use that, in a gibe not without justice, it has been called "Smith's Country, 'tis of Thee."
And if you are young and a lover of your country, do you not love its physical aspects, "its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills"? And if so, do you love only those parts of it which you never see and the appearance of which you have no power to modify? Or do you love the land only and not the people, the nation, the government?
When you sing "My country, 'tis of thee," you do not mean, "My post-office, 'tis of thee," nor yet, "My fellow citizens, 'tis of you, just as the creatures who crowd the street and who overfill the railway cars," that I sing. If the poet continues in his own song to celebrate the land, the "rocks and rills," the "woods and templed hills," he is still speaking only of symbols.
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