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| MANY a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish’d face, | |
| Many a planet by many a sun may roll with a dust of a vanish’d race. | |
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| Raving politics, never at rest—as this poor earth’s pale history runs,— | |
| What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns? | |
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| Lies upon this side, lies upon that side, truthless violence mourn’d by the Wise, | 5 |
| Thousands of voices drowning his own in a popular torrent of lies upon lies; | |
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| Stately purposes, valor in battle, glorious annals of army and fleet, | |
| Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, trumpets of victory, groans of defeat; | |
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| Innocence seeth’d in her mother’s milk, and Charity setting the martyr aflame; | |
| Thraldom who walks with the banner of Freedom, and recks not to ruin a realm in her name; | 10 |
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| Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the gloom of doubts that darken the schools; | |
| Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, follow’d up by her vassal legion of fools; | |
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| Trade flying over a thousand seas with her spice and her vintage, her silk and her corn; | |
| Desolate offing, sailorless harbors, famishing populace, wharves forlorn; | |
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| Star of the morning, Hope in the sunrise; gloom of the evening, Life at a close; | 15 |
| Pleasure who flaunts on her wide downway with her flying robe and her poison’d rose; | |
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| Pain, that has crawl’d from the corpse of Pleasure, a worm which writhes all day, and at night | |
| Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, and stings him back to the curse of the light; | |
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| Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; honest Poverty, bare to the bone; | |
| Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty; Flattery gilding the rift in a throne; | 20 |
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| Fame blowing out from her golden trumpet a jubilant challenge to Time and to Fate; | |
| Slander, her shadow, sowing the nettle on all the laurell’d graves of the Great; | |
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| Love for the maiden, crown’d with marriage, no regrets for aught that has been, | |
| Household happiness, gracious children, debtless competence, golden mean; | |
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| National hatreds of whole generations, and pigmy spites of the village spire; | 25 |
| Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, and vows that are snapp’d in a moment of fire; | |
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| He that has liv’d for the lust of a minute, and died in the doing it, flesh without mind; | |
| He that has nail’d all flesh to the Cross, till Self died out in the love of his kind; | |
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| Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all these old revolutions of earth; | |
| All new-old revolutions of Empire—change of the tide—what is all of it worth? | 30 |
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| What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer? | |
| All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is fair? | |
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| What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last, | |
| Swallow’d in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown’d in the deeps of a meaningless Past? | |
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| What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment’s anger of bees in their hive?— | 35 |
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| Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead but alive. | |
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