Holding revel of worms in a corse;

A city of malady sore,
Over-ripe for the big doom's crack:

A city of hymnical snore;
Connubial truths and lies

Demanding an instant divorce,
Clean as the bright from the black.

It were well for thy system to sermonize.
There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack.

Then up stand thou in the midst:
Thy good grain out of thee thresh,

Hand upon heart: relate
What things thou legally didst

For the Archseducer of flesh.
Omitting the murmurs of women and fate,

Confess thee an instrument armed
To be snare of our wanton, our weak,

Of all by the sensual charmed.
For once shall repentance be done by the tongue:

Speak, though execrate, speak
A word on grandmotherly Laws

Giving rivers of gold to our young,
In the days of their hungers impure;

To furnish them beak and claws,
And make them a banquet's lure.

Thou the example, saved
Miraculously by this poor skin!

Thereat let the Purse be waved:
The snake-slough sick of the snaky sin:

A devil, if devil as devil behaved
Ever, thou knowest, look thou but in,

Where he shivers, a culprit fettered and shaved;
O a bird stripped of feather, a fish clipped of fin!

And commend for a washing the torrents of wrath,
Which hurl at the foe of the dearest men prize

Rough-rolling boulders and froth.
Gigantical enginery they can command,

For the crushing of enemies not of great size:
But hold to thy desperate stand.

Men's right of bequeathing their all to their own
(With little regard for the creatures they squeezed);

Their mill and mill-water and nether mill-stone
Tied fast to their infant; lo, this is the last

Of their hungers, by prudent devices appeased.
The law they decree is their ultimate slave;

Wherein we perceive old Voracity glassed.
It works from their dust, and it reeks of their grave.

Point them to greener, though Journals be guns;
To brotherly fields under fatherly skies;

Where the savage still primitive learns of a debt
He has owed since he drummed on his belly for war;

And how for his giving, the more will he get;
For trusting his fellows, leave friends round his sons:

Till they see, with the gape of a startled surprise,
Their adored tyrant-monster a brute to abhor,

The sun of their system a father of flies!
So, for such good hope, take their scourge unashamed;

'Tis the portion of them who civilize,
Who speak the word novel and true:

How the brutish antique of our springs may be tamed,
Without loss of the strength that should push us to flower;

How the God of old time will act Satan of new,
If we keep him not straight at the higher God aimed;

For whose habitation within us we scour
This house of our life; where our bitterest pains

Are those to eject the Infernal, who heaps
Mire on the soul. Take stripes or chains;

Grip at thy standard reviled.
And what if our body be dashed from the steeps?

Our spoken in protest remains.
A young generation reaps.

The young generation! ah, there is the child
Of our souls down the Ages! to bleed for it, proof

That souls we have, with our senses filed,
Our shuttles at thread of the woof.

May it be braver than ours,
To encounter the rattle of hostile bolts,

To look on the rising of Stranger Powers.
May it know how the mind in expansion revolts

From a nursery Past with dead letters aloof,
And the piping to stupor of Precedents shun,

In a field where the forefather print of the hoof
Is not yet overgrassed by the watering hours,

And should prompt us to Change, as to promise of sun,
Till brain-rule splendidly towers.

For that large light we have laboured and tramped
Thorough forests and bogland, still to perceive

Our animate morning stamped
With the lines of a sombre eve.

A timorous thing ran the innocent hind,
When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood,

The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve,
And the lion effulgently ramped.

Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood,
By right of the better in kind.

But now will it breed yon bestial brood
Three-fold thrice over, if bent to bind,

As the healthy in chains with the sick,
Unto despot usage our issuing mind.

It signifies battle or death's dull knell.
Precedents icily written on high

Challenge the Tentatives hot to rebel.
Our Mother, who speeds her bloomful quick

For the march, reads which the impediment well.
She smiles when of sapience is their boast.

O loose of the tug between blood run dry
And blood running flame may our offspring run!

May brain democratic be king of the host!
Less then shall the volumes of History tell

Of the stop in progression, the slip in relapse,
That counts us a sand-slack inch hard won

Beneath an oppressive incumbent perhaps.
Let the senile lords in a parchment sky,

And the generous turbulents drunken of morn,
Their battle of instincts put by,

A moment examine this field:
On a Roman street cast thoughtful eye,

Along to the mounts from the bog-forest weald.
It merits a glance at our history's maps,

To see across Britain's old shaggy unshorn,
Through the Parties in strife internecine, foot

The ruler's close-reckoned direct to the mark.
From the head ran the vanquisher's orderly route,

In the stride of his forts through the tangle and dark.
From the head runs the paved firm way for advance,

And we shoulder, we wrangle! The light on us shed
Shows dense beetleblackness in swarm, lurid Chance,

The Goddess of gamblers, above. From the head,
Then when it worked for the birth of a star

Fraternal with heaven's in beauty and ray,