Ode to Poem Ranker

What a vista of happy work opens out here! What is there to prevent our using this mightiest of all agencies committed to human agents, the word, which is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword? By this means, even a young girl may be privileged to make that word sound in the ears of many who would not listen to it otherwise. By this, the incoruptible seed may be sown in otherwise unreachable ground. We can hardly consider the keeping of our words, without recollecting that upon them depends that greatest of our responsibilities; our influence. We have no choice in the matter; we cannot evade or avoid it; and there is no more possibility of our limiting it, or even tracing its limits, than there is of setting a bound to the far-vibrating sound waves, or watching their flow through the invisible air. Not one sentence that passes these screens of ours, but must be an invisibly prolonged influence, not dying away into silence, but living away into the words and deeds of others. The thought would not be so oppressive, if we could know what we have done and shall do by what we have written. But we NEVER can, as a matter of fact. We may trace it back a little way, and get a glimpse of some results for good or evil; but we may never see any more of it than we can see of a shooting star flashing through the night with a momentary revelation of one step of its strange path. Even if the next instant plunges it into aparent annihilation, as it strikes the atmosphere, we know that it is not really so, but that its mysterious material and force must be added to the complicated matter and forces with which it has made contact. All of which is forever altered in the exchange.