III

What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know;
  These have found piteous voice in song and prose;
But for the Oppressed, their darkness and their woe,
  Their grinding centuries,—­what Muse had those? 
Though hall and palace had nor eyes nor ears,
  Hardening a people’s heart to senseless stone,
Thou knewest them, O Earth, that drank their tears, 40
  O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate moan! 
They noted down their fetters, link by link;
Coarse was the hand that scrawled, and red the ink;
  Rude was their score, as suits unlettered men,
Notched with a headsman’s axe upon a block: 
What marvel if, when came the avenging shock,
  ’Twas Ate, not Urania, held the pen?

IV

With eye averted, and an anguished frown,
  Loathingly glides the Muse through scenes of strife,
Where, like the heart of Vengeance up and down, 50
  Throbs in its framework the blood-muffled knife;
Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feet
  Turn never backward:  hers no bloody glare;
Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet,
  And where it enters there is no despair: 
Not first on palace and cathedral spire
Quivers and gleams that unconsuming fire;
  While these stand black against her morning skies,
The peasant sees it leap from peak to peak
  Along his hills; the craftsman’s burning eyes 60
Own with cool tears its influence mother-meek;
  It lights the poet’s heart up like a star;
  Ah! while the tyrant deemed it still afar,
And twined with golden threads his futile snare. 
  That swift, convicting glow all round him ran;
’Twas close beside him there,
Sunrise whose Memnon is the soul of man.

V

O Broker-King, is this thy wisdom’s fruit? 
  A dynasty plucked out as ’t were a weed
  Grown rankly in a night, that leaves no seed! 70
Could eighteen years strike down no deeper root? 
  But now thy vulture eye was turned on Spain;
A shout from Paris, and thy crown falls off,
  Thy race has ceased to reign,
And thou become a fugitive and scoff: 
Slippery the feet that mount by stairs of gold,
And weakest of all fences one of steel;
  Go and keep school again like him of old,
The Syracusan tyrant;—­thou mayst feel
Royal amid a birch-swayed commonweal! 80

VI

Not long can he be ruler who allows
  His time to run before him; thou wast naught
Soon as the strip of gold about thy brows
  Was no more emblem of the People’s thought: 
Vain were thy bayonets against the foe
  Thou hadst to cope with; thou didst wage
War not with Frenchmen merely;—­no,
  Thy strife was with the Spirit of the Age,
The invisible Spirit whose first breath divine 89
    Scattered thy frail endeavor,
And, like poor last year’s leaves, whirled thee and thine
      Into the Dark forever!