CYRUS THE GREAT "3 
designs, both for day and night; but, passing by all of them, 
we were especially struck with the following distich on the 
side of a car: 
With wild huzzas now let the welkin ring, 
Columbia’s got Britannia on a string. 
. . . The fact is, that an avalanche of people descended upon 
us, and New York was crushed for once; but we do not lay 
Atlantic cables every day.” 
New York was resolved to outdo even the memorable cele- 
bration at the completion of the Erie canal over thirty years 
before. As Henry Field afterward remarked, “It seems 
strange now to sit down in cold blood and read what was pub- 
lished in the papers of that day.” Among the many poems 
composed during the enthusiasm of the time was one of twelve 
stanzas by John G. Saxe published in Harper's Weekly. ‘The 
last two stanzas were as follows: 
Now long live James, and long live Vic, 
And long live gallant Cyrus 
And may his courage, faith, and zeal 
With emulation fire us. 
And may we honor evermore 
The manly, bold, and stable, 
And tell our sons, to make them brave, 
How Cyrus laid the cable. 
In the 1870’s this jingle was printed in hundreds of thousands 
of “fourth readers” and recited on school platforms through- 
out the country. Field was not to blame for this. It was a 
consequence of the taste of the period. One of the worst 
stanzas went as follows: 
Bold Cyrus Field he said, says he, 
“I have a pretty notion, 
That I can run a telegraph 
Across the Atlantic Ocean.” 
