- Observe them, and down rearward for a term,
Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm. 
Thence look this way, across the fields that show
Men’s early form of speech for Yes and No. 
My sister a bruised infant’s utterance had;
And issuing stronger, to mankind ’twas mad. 
I knew my home where I had choice to feel
The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.

- Speak of this Age.

- When you it shall discern Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.

- For neither of us has it any care; Its learning is through Science to despair.

- Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not With evil, casts the burden of its lot.  This Age climbs earth.

- To challenge heaven.

- Not less
The lower deeps.  It laughs at Happiness! 
That know I, though the echoes of it wail,
For one step upward on the crags you scale. 
Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,
Which means our soul asleep or body’s lust,
Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat
A temperate common music, sunlike heat
The happiness not predatory sheds!

- But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads,
Now rages to outdo a horny Past. 
Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast
Are thrown by every novel light upraised. 
The world’s whole round smokes ominously, amazed
And trembling as its pregnant AEtna swells. 
Combustibles on hot combustibles
Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire
The mountain-torrent of infernal ire
And leave the track of devils where men built. 
Perceptive of a doom, the sinner’s guilt
Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud,
If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,
To conscience, reason, human love; in vain: 
None save they but the souls which them contain. 
No extramural God, the God within
Alone gives aid to city charged with sin. 
A world that for the spur of fool and knave,
Sweats in its laboratory, what shall save? 
But men who ply their wits in such a school,
Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.

- Much have I studied hard Necessity! 
To know her Wisdom’s mother, and that we
May deem the harshness of her later cries
In labour a sure goad to prick the wise,
If men among the warnings which convulse,
Can gravely dread without the craven’s pulse. 
Long ere the rising of this Age of ours,
The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers. 
Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,
And are as lasting as the parent thing. 
Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,
They might o’ermatch and have mankind at will.