An hour thence, his duty nobly done, Back to his cell he came. Unasked, unsought, lo! his reward was won! Rafters and walls and floor were yet aflame With all the matchless glory of that Sun, And in the centre stood the Blessed One-- (Praised be His Holy Name!) Who, for our sakes, our crosses made His own. And bore our weight of shame! Down on the threshold fell Monk Gabriel, His forehead pressed upon the floor of clay; And, while in deep humility he lay, Tears raining from his happy eyes away, 'Whence is this favor, Lord?' he strove to say. The Vision only said, Lifting its shining head: 'If thou hadst staid, O son! _I_ must have fled!' PHILADELPHIA THE CENTURY OF INVENTIONS. CONTAINING A FEW COMMENTS ON THE WORK OF THAT NAME, PUBLISHED BY THE MARQUIS OF WORCESTER, IN 1663. There is nothing which the world dreads so much as an unpitying truth. The history of ideas is that of men trying to persuade themselves that special miracles of amiability are ever being worked, from the cradle to the grave, in their favor. Of the tremendous inconsistency and destructiveness which such miracles imply, they take no heed. The most unpalatable fact in physics is that of the Struggle for Life. Ideas once born may never die, but it is worth noting how many men must die ere their ideas can live. The Indo-Germanic race has always been blessed with many of those self-cursed martyrs, the Anticipators, or the men who have outstripped their age. Like the advance guard of the summer swallows, they have generally died by frosts and lived in fables. Germany is very proud of her Berchthold Schwartz, and in her pride has made a proverb declaring that his invention was the proof of supreme wisdom. When they describe a fool, they say there that he did not discover gunpowder. But 'the first handful of gunpowder' did not, as Carlyle claims, drive Monk Schwartz's pestle through the ceiling. Long before Schwartz, lived Bacon; and a century or so before Bacon, there were in existence Norman-Latin recipes, says Palsgrave--who had seen them--_ad faciendum le craké_, for making firecrackers--at least, for making gunpowder which would crack merrily when fired. Stained glass windows, according to the cheap and easy explanations of those who used to send us to natural scenery for every origin in architecture, were suggested by beholding the winter sunset lines of the sky through the bare gothic-window tracery of a leafless forest. Recent research finds the stained window in the antique burning East, where no studies were made by frost or forest light--nay, the leaves carved by tradition-loving Gothic Free Masons in churches often keep a peculiar Eastern form.