Symphony of Ages 05 – Elegy For A Lost Star – Haydon, Elizabeth

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Many thanks to three sets of innkeepers whose hospitality was inspirational in the places I visited while researching this book:

The Taste of Alaska Lodge, Fairbanks, Alaska

Quagmire Manor, Homer, New York

King’s Inn, Huntsville, Alabama

WE are the music-makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world’s great cities,

And out of a fabulous story

We fashion an empire’s glory:

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song’s measure

Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

And Babel itself with our mirth;

And o’erthrew them with prophesying

To the old of the new world’s worth;

For each age is a dream that is dying,

Or one diat is coming to birth.

-Arthur O’Shaughnessy

Seven Gifts of the Creator,

Seven colors of light

Seven seas in the wide world,

Seven days in a sennight,

Seven months of fallow

Seven continents trod, weave

Seven eras of history

Oh, our Mother the Earth;