End of the world -- Fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Science fiction; Twenty-first century -- Fiction
wake, and perform the animal functions; but man, in himself weak, yet
more powerful in congregated numbers than wind or ocean; man, the
queller of the elements, the lord of created nature, the peer of
demi-gods, existed no longer.
Farewell to the patriotic scene, to the love of liberty and well earned
meed of virtuous aspiration!—farewell to crowded senate, vocal with the
councils of the wise, whose laws were keener than the sword blade
tempered at Damascus!—farewell to kingly pomp and warlike pageantry;
the crowns are in the dust, and the wearers are in their
graves!—farewell to the desire of rule, and the hope of victory; to
high vaulting ambition, to the appetite for praise, and the craving for
the suffrage of their fellows! The nations are no longer! No senate
sits in council for the dead; no scion of a time honoured dynasty pants
to rule over the inhabitants of a charnel house; the general’s hand is
cold, and the soldier has his untimely grave dug in his native fields,
unhonoured, though in youth. The market-place is empty, the candidate
for popular favour finds none whom he can represent. To chambers of
painted state farewell!—To midnight revelry, and the panting emulation
of beauty, to costly dress and birth-day shew, to title and the gilded
coronet, farewell!
Farewell to the giant powers of man,—to knowledge that could pilot the
deep-drawing bark through the opposing waters of shoreless ocean,—to
science that directed the silken balloon through the pathless air,—to
the power that could put a barrier to mighty waters, and set in motion
wheels, and beams, and vast machinery, that could divide rocks of
granite or marble, and make the mountains plain!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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