Quickly as its warring scimitars of victory had slain? Saw what school-tradition for nature's kind method admir'd, --In those lifedraining slow cures and bedridden agues,-- Forgotten, or condemn'd as want of care in a surgeon? Tho' MEDICINE makes not so plain an appeal to the vulgar, Yet she lags not a whit: her pregnant thēory touches Deeper discoveries,[v]her more complete revolution Gives promise of wider benefits in larger abundance. Where she nam'd the disease she now separates the bacillus; 280 Sets the atoms of offence, those blind and sickly bloodeaters, 'Neath lens and daylight, forcing their foul propagations, Which had ever prosper'd in dark impunity unguest, Now to behave in sight, deliver their poisonous extract And their strange self-brew'd, self-slaying juice to be handled, Experimented upon, set aside and stor'd to oppose them. So novel and obscure a research, such hard revelations Of Nature's cabinet,--tho' with fact amply accordant, And by hypothesis much dark difficulty resolving, Are not quickly receiv'd nor approv'd, and sensitive idlers, Venturing in the profound terrible penetralia of life, 291 Are shock'd by[v]a method that shuns not contamination With crūel Nature's most secret processes unmaskt. And yet in all mankind's disappointed history, now first Have[v]his scouts push'd surely within[v]his foul enemies' lines, And his sharpshooters descried their insidious foe, Those swarming parasites, that barely within the detection Of manifold search-light, have bred, swimming unsuspected Thro' man's brain and limbs, slaying with loathly pollution His beauty's children,[v]his sweet scīons of affection, 300 In fev'rous torment and tears, his home desolating Of their fair innocence, breaking[v]his proud passionate heart, And his kindly belief in GOD'S good justice arraigning. With what wildly directed attack, what an armory illjudged, Has he, (alas, poor man,) with what cumbrous machination Sought to defend himself from their Lilliputian onslaught; Aye discharging around him, in obscure night, at a venture, Ev'ry missile which[v]his despair confus'dly imagin'd; His simples, compounds, specifics, chemical therapeutics, Juice of plants, whatever was nam'd in lordly Salerno's 310 Herbaries and gardens, vipers, snails, all animal filth, Incredible quackeries, the pretentious jugglery of knaves, Green electricities, saints' bones and priestly anointings. Fools! that oppose his one scīentific intelligent hope! Grant us an hundred years, and man shall hold in abeyance These foul distempers, and with this world's benefactors Shall PASTEUR obtain the reward of saintly devotion, His crown hēroic, who fought not destiny in vain.