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    The Song of the Aeronaut
    by Berton Braley

    Up from the emerald turf I rise to the lure of the
            arching blue,
    With a song in my heart like the ancient song the
            great Olympians knew.
    While I steady myself on wings of white to the rush
            of the roving breeze,
    Tempting the wrath of the infinite, the marvelous
            weightless seas;
    Below me the world is a blur of green, a flicker of
            brown and red,
    And the vault of the sky is mine to try and the
            limitless vast ahead!
    It's sport that only the birds have known who poise
            in the upper day,
    But now I challenge their airy throne--these kings
            of the blue highway

    I buffet my route through the winds that shout, I dip to
            the billows of air,
    And mock me the hawk and the pirate bird that
            hover in wonder there.
    Disdainful I sweep above mortals who creep like
            worms of the overturned clod,
    And serenely I soar in the empire of space--an
            insolent, strong-winged god!
    The purr of the motors, the shiver of wires and the
            lift of the quivering planes,
    As I clamber the sides of aerial hills and swoop
            down aerial lanes,
    Stir all my blood to a turbulent flood till all that is
            earthly of me
    Is lost in a rapture of speed and of flight--I am free,
            I am free, I am free!

    For mine is no road that is meted and bound, but the
            way of the wind and the sky,
    Beyond all the dust and the fret and the heat, above
            all the clamor I fly
    To the height where the hawk circles wary and lone,
            to the vault where the bald eagle scream,
    Where the fetters of earth and the worries of earth
            are dim in the haze of a dream.
    Then sudden I drop toward the world that I left and
            the wind whistles keen through the frame,
    Or I wheel and I swing in a glorious ring on a trail
            that is never the same.
    Oh, danger is mine in this frolic divine as I dare all
            the forces that slay,
    But mine is the song of the free and the strong--the
            Lord of the Blue Highway!

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