“All men of every birth,
      Yea, great ones of the earth,
  Kings and their councillors, have I drawn down;
      But I am held of Thee,—­
      Why dost Thou trouble me,
  To bring me up, dead King, that keep’st Thy crown? 
      Yet for all courtiers hast but ten
Lowly, unlettered, Galilean fishermen.

      “Olympian heights are bare
      Of whom men worshipped there,
  Immortal feet their snows may print no more;
      Their stately powers below
      Lie desolate, nor know
  This thirty years Thessalian grove or shore;
      But I am elder far than they;—­
Where is the sentence writ that I must pass away?

      “Art thou come up for this,
      Dark regent, awful Dis? 
  And hast thou moved the deep to mark our ending? 
      And stirred the dens beneath,
      To see us eat of death,
  With all the scoffing heavens toward us bending? 
      Help! powers of ill, see not us die!”
But neither demon dares, nor angel deigns, reply.

      Her sisters, fallen on sleep,
      Fade in the upper deep,
  And their grim lord sits on, in doleful trance;
      Till her black veil she rends,
      And with her death-shriek bends
  Downward the terrors of her countenance;
      Then, whelmed in night and no more seen,
They leave the world a doubt if ever such have been.

      And the winged armies twain
      Their awful watch maintain;
  They mark the earth at rest with her Great Dead. 
      Behold, from antres wide,
      Green Atlas heave his side;
  His moving woods their scarlet clusters shed,
      The swathing coif his front that cools,
And tawny lions lapping at his palm-edged pools.

      Then like a heap of snow,
      Lying where grasses grow,
  See glimmering, while the moony lustres creep,
      Mild mannered Athens, dight
      In dewy marbles white,
  Among her goddesses and gods asleep;
      And swaying on a purple sea,
The many moored galleys clustering at her quay.

      Also, ‘neath palm-trees’ shade,
      Amid their camels laid,
  The pastoral tribes with all their flocks at rest;
      Like to those old-world folk,
      With whom two angels broke
  The bread of men at Abram’s courteous ’quest,
      When, listening as they prophesied,
His desert princess, being reproved, her laugh denied.

      Or from the Morians’ land
      See worshipped Nilus bland,
  Taking the silver road he gave the world,
      To wet his ancient shrine
      With waters held divine,
  And touch his temple steps with wavelets curled,
      And list, ere darkness change to gray,
Old minstrel-throated Memnon chanting in the day.