When will the Muses rest? When are they weary? And when they would not cease to call to me I went to them and I said: "The Golden Town is the Golden Town no longer. They have sold their pillars for brass and their temples for money, they have made coins out of their golden doors. It is become a dark town full of trouble, there is no ease in its streets, beauty has left it and the old songs are gone." "Go take our message," they cried. And I said to the high Muses: "You do not understand. You have no message for the Golden Town, the holy city no longer." "Go take our message," they cried. "What is your message?" I said to the high Muses. And when I heard their message I made excuses, dreading to speak such things in the Golden Town; and again they bade me go. And I said: "I will not go. None will believe me." And still the Muses cry to me all night long. They do not understand. How should they know? THE THREE TALL SONS And at last Man raised on high the final glory of his civilization, the towering edifice of the ultimate city. Softly beneath him in the deeps of the earth purred his machinery fulfilling all his needs, there was no more toil for man. There he sat at ease discussing the Sex Problem. And sometimes painfully out of forgotten fields, there came to his outer door, came to the furthest rampart of the final glory of Man, a poor old woman begging. And always they turned her away. This glory of Man's achievement, this city was not for her. It was Nature that came thus begging in from the fields, whom they always turned away. And away she went again alone to her fields. And one day she came again, and again they sent her hence. But her three tall sons came too. "These shall go in," she said. "Even these my sons to your city." And the three tall sons went in. And these are Nature's sons, the forlorn one's terrible children, War, Famine and Plague. Yea and they went in there and found Man unawares in his city still poring over his Problems, obsessed with his civilization, and never hearing their tread as those three came up behind. COMPROMISE They built their gorgeous home, their city of glory, above the lair of the earthquake. They built it of marble and gold in the shining youth of the world. There they feasted and fought and called their city immortal, and danced and sang songs to the gods. None heeded the earthquake in all those joyous streets. And down in the deeps of the earth, on the black feet of the abyss, they that would conquer Man mumbled long in the darkness, mumbled and goaded the earthquake to try his strength with that city, to go forth blithely at night and to gnaw its pillars like bones. And down in those grimy deeps the earthquake answered them, and would not do their pleasure and would not stir from thence, for who knew who they were who danced all day where he rumbled, and what if the lords of that city that had no fear of his anger were haply even the gods!