But craftsmen skill'd like Sinon in old time,
Who offered ruin upon Ilium's shrine,
Or Clazomenian Artemon, who wrought
The fierce balista, or Dædalus fam'd,
Rival not wisely Him, whose moment's thought
Created myriad systems, stars and suns.
Each artizan on Babel sudden heard
Mysterious voices from familiar lips,
Unknown behests from architects wellknown, And each misdeemed the other mad or seized With fiend possession. Anger, wrath, distrust Threw gloom on every stricken countenance, And sundered the assemblage and dispersed O'er undiscovered realms and regions wild, Forest and seashore, mountain, dale, and plain, Proud men and builders vain, who left behind The monument of folly to proclaim
The nothingness of man's magnificence.
In earlier years, unvisited as yet,
Though fraught with many evils, by the rage Of worst assassins, in my solitude
sung the vengeance and the recompense
Of guilt that wrecked the Cities of the Plain;
And, earlier still, the triumph on the waste
Of Israel o'er the banded host and pride
The Dæmon as he swiftly sweeps the world,
Rushing from woe to woe, and bearing high
His carnage front, crown'd with its wreath of flam
But thou canst picture such disastrous deeds
As leave their deadliest wounds in life, and so
Offer upon thy country's shrine thy lay.
Guide now my flying song through awful scenes
That darken the soul's sunlight, and let not
Thy deep moralities and lessons stern
Be wanting to instruct the soul of man
That wisdom dwells with cloistered gentleness,
And greatness with a conquest o'er desire,
And fame with justice and with duty, peace!
Remorseless avarice and serpent guile;
The ravine and the rapine of men loos'd
By legal sanction on each other's weal;
Accursed usury and trade that seared
The generous spirit of benignant youth;
Feud, faction, rivalry in court and camp,
In nuptial pomp and gaudy obsequies,
And daily intercourse; pale jealousy,
Blighting the mildewed heart and forging wrongs
To consummate suspicion; envy, hate,
▼atii cluts just aliu umvigtu sutituts
Drave sleeping passion into ruthless war.
Nor Sheikh nor Ephori nor Archon throned In Areopagus, nor Consul stern
In curule chair, nor chief nor king nor czar,
Could ever crush the giant crimes of men,
Or hold, when maddened by indignities,
Their bandit natures subject to his law..
All codes and pandects and enactments framed
By skill'd and titled senates cannot bind
Man to his fellow's weal, nor countermine
The quick evasions of a mind resolved
To build on human heads its dome of gold.
Custom creates desire, and want uplifts
Its voice and yearns for common vanities;
And folly, minister to pride, hath had
Its bribe in every age and clime and heart;
And interest coins new gold from sack and spoil
To bear the gorgeous pageant bravely on.
So luxury dissolves the strength of men,
And poverty degrades the eagle thought;
And faith deserts all commerce and all speech.
Then tyrants trample; but the same dark fiend,
That covered them with purple, yet hath slaves
More terrible than this; and rebels crouch
The record of destruction and despair;
The life of man hath parted from each sod
Where spreads a kingdom, and the voice of woe
Uttered its wailings round triumphal cars,
And purple pomp and unrestricted power,
Since first the astonished sun beheld the sin
And shuddering horror of Earth's fallen sire.
Ixion's wheel, the rock of Sisyphus,
The Danaides' hopeless, endless toil,
But image to our wiser sense of fate
The misery and the madness that have crowned Lust and ambition since the cherub's sword Gleamed o'er the closed gate of lost paradise.
Lo! glorious Babylon-the gorgeous queen, The lady of earth's kingdoms! beauty, strength, Dominion, glory, and magnificence
Gleamed in her diadem, and nations quailed
Before the rushing squadrons of her kings.
Towers, castles, palaces and guarded walls,
That shadowed the sheen dayspring;—colonnades
Whose porphyry pillars glowed with crowns of ge
And glittering marts of merchant princes meet
To purchase monarchies ;-and temples wreathed
And grovelike banyan, hanging from the walls--
All these defended and adorned her pride,
Her boasted immortality of power,
And captive monarchs laid their sceptres down
Beneath her footstool, while her king of kings,
Nabocolasser deigned to bid them serve.
Girded by battlements that mocked assault,
And beautified by every art of man,
Her bands invincible o'erspread the earth,
And garnered up in her proud palaces
The majesty and pomp of prostrate thrones.
But strength, on odours pillowed, faints and dies,
And glory brooks not love's voluptuous ease.
Fame sculptures its own throne and monument,
O'er perishable existencies and things
Doomed to decay it pours its deathless soul,
And in the realms of thought forever reigns.
But from the hidden urns of gold and gems
The spirit of magnificence enshrined
In darkness, from temptation's weak research,
The destined king, whom vice emasculates,
Bears to his banquet poison and despair!
Nimrod and Ninus and Semiramis
Gazed from the icy pinnacle sublime
Of restless action and unslumbering toil
On broken dynasties and conquered crowns;
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