Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Electricity
Stretches, for leagues and leagues, the Wire,
A hidden path for a Child of Fire—
Over its silent spaces sent,
Swifter than Ariel ever went,
From continent to continent.
Wm. Henry Burleigh—The Rhyme of the Cable.
And fire a mine in China, here
With sympathetic gunpowder.
Butler—Hudibras. Pt. II. Canto III. L. 295.
While Franklin’s quiet memory climbs to heaven,
Calming the lightning which he thence hath riven.
Byron—Age of Bronze. V.
And stoic Franklin’s energetic shade
Robed in the lightnings which his hand allay’d.
Byron—Age of Bronze. VIII.
Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.
Byron—Childe Harold. Canto IV. St. 23.
To put a girdle round about the world.
Geo. Chapman—Bussy d’Ambois. Act I. Sc. 1.
A vast engine of wonderful delicacy and intricacy, a machine that is like the tools of the Titans put in your hands. This machinery, in its external fabric so massive and so exquisitely adjusted, and in its internal fabric making new categories of thought, new ways of thinking about life.
Charles Ferguson—Address. Stevens’ Indicator. Vol. XXXIV. No. 1. 1917.
Notwithstanding my experiments with electricity the thunderbolt continues to fall under our noses and beards; and as for the tyrant, there are a million of us still engaged at snatching away his sceptre.
Franklin—Comment on Tubgot’s inscription in a letter to Felix Nogaret, who translated the lines into French.
But matchless Franklin! What a few
Can hope to rival such as you.
Who seized from kings their sceptred pride
And turned the lightning’s darts aside.
Philip Freneau—On the Death of Benjamin Franklin.
Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.
Hawthorne—The House of the Seven Gables. The Flight of Two Owls.
A million hearts here wait our call,
All naked to our distant speech—
I wish that I could ring them all
And have some welcome news for each.
Christopher Morley—Of a Telephone Directory. In The Rocking Horse.
An ideal’s love-fraught, imperious call
That bids the spheres become articulate.
Josephine L. Peabody—Wireless.
This is a marvel of the universe:
To fling a thought across a stretch of sky—
Some weighty message, or a yearning cry,
It matters not; the elements rehearse
Man’s urgent utterance, and his words traverse
The spacious heav’ns like homing birds that fly
Unswervingly, until, upreached on high,
A quickened hand plucks off the message terse.
Josephine L. Peabody—Wireless.
Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul,
And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.
Pope—Eloise to Abelard. L. 57.
I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.
Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act II. Sc. 1. L. 175.
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say “It lightens.”
Romeo and Juliet. Act II. Sc. 2. L. 119.
Eripuit cælo fulmen, mox sceptra tyrannis.
He snatched the thunderbolt from heaven, the sceptre from tyrants.
Turgot—Inscription for the Houdon bust of Franklin. See Condorcet—Life of Turgot. P. 200. Ed. 1786. Eripuit fulmenque Jovi, Phœboque sagittas. Modified from Anti-Lucretius. I. 5. 96, by Cardinal ee Polignac. Eripuit Jovi fulmen viresque tonandi. Marcus Manlius—Astronomica. I. 104. Line claimed by Frederick von der Trenck asserted at his trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, July 9, 1794. See Gartenlaube—Last Hours of Baron Trenck.