Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CENTURY Read before the Progress Circle New Years Eve, 1900. Open your ponderous portals, O Time ! Oh, open your gates to a cycle sublime — Open them swiftly, for the races of men Are awaiting thy signal ere marching again. Legions are pausing 'twixt the old and the new, While the pageant of years sweeps by in review. A century past, and the babe of that day Is drowsily dreaming the moments away; He awakens in youth pondering a dream Of the marvelous light beginning to gleam: In manhood, a giant, with sinewy brawn To wrestle Dame Nature till coming of dawn; AH night is the battle; when darkness is past, The Dame gives her scion a blessing at last. Now wrinkled and grizzled, a hundred years old, He totters and halts, while his triumphs are told; Smiles proudly and cries, as a conqueror ought: " Behold, O my children, the wonders I wrought! My creatures belch fire through the watches of night, And carry you swift as an eagle in flight; I have shrunken the earth till oceans are lakes; I catch every cry that humanity makes; Over mountainous heights and under the sea Run nerves of the world till they center in me; A touch of the wire and I banish the gloom; I hear voices afar as if in the room, And even my dead, as they sleep in the tomb, Still speak to the quick as though buried too soon: Through wireless air mystic messages come ; In depths of the deep my leviathans run; Vast islands I formed of a continent grand, And the seas went marrying at my command; On the shoreless, the treacherous air I float And laugh at the wind waves that threaten my boat. With the lightning my thrall three kingdoms I own: Earth and water and air acknowledge my throne. I have pictured the heart still throbbing with pain, But the soul—ah, the soul! — I've...