Langdon Smith

“Evolution : A Fantasy (1909) (PDF at Google) - (Various formats at The Internet Archive)”

“Then as we linger at luncheon here O'er many a dainty dish,Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a tadpole and I was a fish.”

“For we know the clod, by the grace of God Will quicken with voice and breath; And we know that Love, with gentle hand Will beckon from death to death.”

“God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds And furnished them wings to fly;We sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn, And I know that it shall not die,Though cities have sprung above the graves Where the crook–bone men made warAnd the ox–wain creaks o'er the buried caves Where the mummied mammoths are.”

“Our love is old, our lives are old, And death shall come amain;Should it come today, what man may say We shall not live again?”

“And that was a million years ago In a time that no man knows;Yet here tonight in the mellow light We sit at Delmonico's.Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs, Your hair is dark as jet,Your years are few, your life is new, Your soul untried, and yet —”

“I carved that fight on a reindeer bone With rude and hairy hand;I pictured his fall on the cavern wall That men might understand.For we lived by blood and the right of might Ere human laws were drawn,And the age of sin did not begin Till our brutal tusks were gone.”

“Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin;From west and east to the crimson feast The clan came tramping in.”

“Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn,Where the mammoth came to drink;Through brawn and bone I drave the stone And slew him upon the brink.”

“I flaked a flint to a cutting edge And shaped it with brutish craft;I broke a shank from the woodland lank And fitted it, head and haft.”

“I was thewed like an Auroch bull And tusked like the great cave bear;And you, my sweet, from head to feet Were gowned in your glorious hair.”

“Thus life by life and love by love We passed through the cycles strange,And breath by breath and death by death We followed the chain of change. Till there came a time in the law of life When o’er the nursing sod, The shadows broke and soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God.”

“And, oh! what beautiful years were these When our hearts clung each to each;When life was filled and our senses thrilled In the first faint dawn of speech.”

“Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,And happy we died once more;Our forms were rolled in the clinging moldOf a Neocomian shore. The eons came and the eons fled And the sleep that wrapped us fastWas riven away in a newer day And the night of death was past.”

“Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feetWriting a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty darkTo hint at a life to come.”

“Mindless we lived and mindless we loved And mindless at last we died;And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift We slumbered side by side.The world turned on in the lathe of time, The hot lands heaved amain,Till we caught our breath from the womb of death And crept into light again.”

“When you were a tadpole and I was a fish In the Paleozoic time,And side by side on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and slime,Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved you even then.”