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| BACKWARD, O Time, and for a single hour | |
| Make a small child of him who stands before us | |
| At the advanced age of seventy-five— | |
| Leander M. Coggswell, multimillionaire. | |
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| In days when gross wealth drugs the very atmosphere, | 5 |
| It would be vain to guard these present lines from its insidious approach. | |
| Shall I seem to overdo | |
| If I give Mr. C. one hundred millions? | |
| Very well; they’re his. | |
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| He lives today in semi-retirement, | 10 |
| And has forgotten partly how the money came; | |
| Completely so, if asked officially. | |
| Others have now bent their backs to the great burden; | |
| He no longer keeps tab, he tells us, on the workings of the vast machine. | |
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| He buys now and then a picture, a coronet, a castle; | 15 |
| He smiles impartially on the great and on the small, | |
| On the heedless and on the inquisitive, | |
| Reads detective stories, | |
| And plays croquet. | |
| |
| Now let us make him a little younger. | 20 |
| We strip him first of his bland leisure | |
| And of his more puerile interests. | |
| Five years ago—yes, even less— | |
| He was aflame to found, to furnish, to fill | |
| His great museum, | 25 |
| He the modern Medici—Cosimo and Lorenzo in one. | |
| Books, manuscripts, madonnas, choked his days; | |
| Art and learning walked captive at his heels. | |
| |
| But Cæsar never grew so great, you say, | |
| Upon such meat as that? | 30 |
| Of course not. There was a previous period; | |
| A phantasmagoric jumble of varied interests | |
| Filled the public air; all was kept aloft | |
| By superhuman skill, and all was juggled | |
| Just a bit too swiftly for the questioning eye to follow— | 35 |
| Even for the interested orb | |
| Of the Uncle of us all: | |
| Banks, foundries, railways, tanks, stock market, state legislatures, what you will; | |
| Everything brought about with suave and Mephistophelean mien | |
| By the great thaumaturge, | 40 |
| While deft assistants at the lesser tables | |
| Passed on the properties and dressed the scene. | |
| |
| Peeling away still further from our friend | |
| His years, dexterity and grandeur, | |
| We find him on a lower stage, | 45 |
| Before a poorer audience, | |
| Doing less skilfully and on a smaller scale | |
| The tricks that made the man—himself. | |
| It seems, viewed restrospectively, a mere rehearsal | |
| Of his immense Performance. | 50 |
| Here, industrious, thrifty and alert | |
| (To give his qualities their better names), | |
| He practiced, in semi-privacy and with no possibility of praise, | |
| The qualities he lauded, later, | |
| In pamphlets and addresses aimed at the nation’s youth. | 55 |
| |
| Back still farther: | |
| No company now; no firm; | |
| Just a lone young individual, | |
| Of parentage blent and non-distinguished, let us say, | |
| With a young helpmate of his own kind; | 60 |
| Both struggling together for a foothold, | |
| Both putting forth their strained endeavors | |
| To feed and clothe a little flock, | |
| And to “get on.” | |
| |
| Next go his wife and children. | 65 |
| We have left now only a young clerk or handy-man, | |
| Of lingo semi-rustic, semi-foreign, semi-citified, quite as you like; | |
| Moling away beneath the surface, | |
| Yet coming up, at intervals, | |
| To see the Main Chance shining in the sky; | 70 |
| Holding his own, and more, against all youthful rivals, | |
| And shaping vigorously the grand ideals | |
| Which, later, were to fire his heart—and ours. | |
| |
| Next we deprive him of his office-stool, | |
| Or of his chance to labor hardily out in the sheds. | 75 |
| He’s but a boy at school— | |
| Quick, quick, with slate and pencil; | |
| Sharp, sharp, among the playground’s crowd. | |
| |
| Next knee-trousers go. | |
| We have a child of four in laughable habiliments | 80 |
| Preserved by some uncouth disciple of Daguerre, | |
| And later shown, in half-tones, | |
| For the derisive adoration of the world; | |
| But with a look, sly and determined, in the eyes, | |
| Which promises much. | 85 |
| |
| Now but an infant-in-arms, | |
| Borne in long convoluted skirts. | |
| “Oh, what a forehead!” cries a visiting aunt, | |
| Pushing the frilled cap back. | |
| And, kissing such brows, mothers have often said with awe, | 90 |
| “He may be president.” | |
| |
| Lastly, a new-born babe, | |
| Hugged close within a home | |
| On some elm-shaded street, | |
| Or in some slattern village farther west, | 95 |
| Or in some stony cabin far beyond our bounds. | |
| |
| Can we go on? | |
| Yes, with Wordsworth, who has Intimations, | |
| And who may have bestowed on him | |
| Long streamers of supernal—or infernal—glory; | 100 |
| Or with Kant, who has Innate Ideas, | |
| And who may well have packed the baby full | |
| Of pre-accumulated notions and experiences; | |
| Or with Galton, who cracks up Heredity, | |
| And who may have presented a complete outfit | 105 |
| Of traits passed on from linked forefathers; | |
| Or with Taine, who comes out strongly for Environment, | |
| And who perhaps decreed our babe should be | |
| Entirely what Surroundings made him. | |
| Modern opinion and current fashion | 110 |
| May favor this last notion still. | |
| |
| Thus our new-born hero came at once | |
| Within a range of influences and waiting opportunities | |
| Which caused his Life to follow | |
| As easily and inevitably | 115 |
| As a corollary upon a theorem proved— | |
| As naturally as some prepotent cloud, | |
| Careering through the littered heavens, | |
| Helps weave strange, disconcerting patterns on earth’s fields. | |
| |
| H’m! Are we not all clouds together?— | 120 |
| Minor cirri, dumpy cumuli, | |
| Multitudinous shreds of vapor, | |
| Rosy or gray, | |
| That float or drive about in tiny tatters; | |
| And some fixed fault within the national sky | 125 |
| Prevents a proper taming of our thunder-heads. | |
| We wait, and no high Cloud-Compeller comes | |
| To help us master our Preponderates. | |
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