Читать книгу Written In the Sky - Mark Carr - Страница 3

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dewFrom the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’dIn the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

— From ‘Locksley Hall’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He presciently penned these words in 1835, when the only means of human flight was the balloon. The Wright brothers would not fly for another sixty-eight years.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

— L.P. Hartley