In humankind diversities of masks,

For rule of men the choice of bait or goads.
The statesman steered the despot to large tasks;

The despot drove the statesman on short roads.
For Order's cause he laboured, as inclined

A soldier's training and his Euclid mind.
His army unto men he could present

As model of the perfect instrument.
That creature, woman, was the sofa soft,

When warriors their dusty armour doffed,
And read their manuals for the making truce

With rosy frailties framed to reproduce.
He farmed his land, distillingly alive

For the utmostextract he might have and hive,
Wherewith to marshal force; and in like scheme,

Benign shone Hymen's torch on young love's dream.
Thus to be strong was he beneficent;

A fount of earth, likewise a firmament.
The disputant in words his eye dismayed:

Opinions blocked his passage. Rent
Were Councils with a gesture; brayed

By hoarse camp-phrase what argument
Dared interpose to waken spleen

In him whose vision grasped the unseen,
Whose counsellor was the ready blade,

Whose argument the cannonade.
He loathed his land's divergent parties, loth

To grant them speech, they were such idle troops;
The friable and the grumous, dizzards both.

Men were good sticks his masterywrought from hoops;
Some serviceable, none credible on oath.

The silly preference they nursed to die
In beds he scorned, and led where they should lie.

If magic made them pliable for his use,
Magician he could be by planned surprise.

For do they see the deuce in human guise,
As men's acknowledged head appears the deuce,

And they will toil with devilish craft and zeal.
Among them certain vagrant wits that had

Ideas buzzed; they were the feebly mad;
Pursuers of a film they hailed ideal;

But could be dangerous fire-flies for a brain
Subdued by fact, still amorous of the inane.

With a breath he blew them out, to beat their wings
The way of such transfeminated things,

And France had sense of vacancy in Light.
That is the soul's dead darkness, making clutch

Wild hands for aid at muscles within touch;
Adding to slavery's chain the stringent twist;

Even when it brings close surety that aright
She reads her Tyrant through his golden mist;

Perceives him fast to a harsher Tyrant bound;
Self-ridden, self-hunted, captive of his aim;

Material grandeur's ape, the Infernal's hound;
Enormous, with no infinite around;

No starred deep sky, no Muse, or lame
The dusty pattering pinions,

The voice as through the brazen tube of Fame.
X

Hugest of engines, a much limited man,
She saw the Lustrous, her great lord, appear

Through that smoked glass her last privation brought
To point her critic eye and spur her thought:

A heart but to propel Leviathan;
A spirit that breathed but in earth's atmosphere.

Amid the plumed and sceptred ones
Irradiatingly Jovian,

The mountain tower capped by the floating cloud;
A nursery screamer where dialectics ruled:

Mannerless, graceless, laughterless, unlike
Herself in all, yet with such power to strike,

That she the various features she could scan
Dared not to sum, though seeing: and befooled

By power which beamed omnipotent, she bowed,
Subservient as roused echo round his guns.

Invulnerable Prince of Myrmidons,
He sparkled, by no sage Athene schooled.

Partly she read her riddle, stricken and pained;
But irony, her spirit's tongue, restrained.

The Critic, last of vital in the proud
Enslaved, when most detectively endowed,

Admired how irony's venom off him ran,
Like rain-drops down a statue cast in bronze:

Whereby of her keen rapier disarmed,
Again her chant of eulogy began,

Protesting, but with slavish senses charmed.
Her warrior, chief among the valorous great

In arms he was, dispelling shades of blame,
With radiance palpable in fruit and weight.

Heard she reproach, his victories blared response;
His victories bent the Critic to acclaim,

As with fresh blows upon a ringing sconce.
Or heard she from scarred ranks of jolly growls

His veterans dwarf their reverence and, like owls,
Laugh in the pitch of discord, to exalt

Their idol for some genial trick or fault,
She, too, became his marching veteran.

Again she took her breath from them who bore
His eagles through the tawny roar,

And murmured at a peaceful state,
That bred the title charlatan,

As missile from the mouth of hate,
For one the daemon fierily filled and hurled,

Cannon his name,
Shattering against a barrier world;

Her supremeplayer of man's primaeval game.
The daemon filled him, and he filled her sons;

Strung them to stature over human height,
As march the standards down the smoky fight;

Her cherubim, her towering mastodons!
Directed vault or breach, break through

Earth's toughest, seasons, elements, tame;
Dash at the bulk the sharpened few;

Count death the smallest of their debts:
Show that the will to do

Is masculine and begets!
These princes unto him the mother owed;

These jewels of manhood that rich hand bestowed.
What wonder, though with wits awake

To read her riddle, for these her offspring's sake; -
And she, before high heaven adulteress,

The lost to honour, in his glory clothed,
Else naked, shamed in sight of men, self-loathed; -

That she should quench her thought, nor worship less
Than ere she bled on sands or snows and knew

The slave's alternative, to worship or to rue!
XI

Bright from the shell of that much limited man,
Her hero, like the falchion out of sheath,