By a firm bar of sand. 
But, dastard listening knave, who said,
’’Twere juster were the Giant dead,
That so yon bawlers may not miss
To vote their own pot-belly’d bliss,’
All that is past! 
We saw the slaying, and were not aghast. 
But ne’er a sun, on village Groom and Bride,
Albeit they guess not how it is,
At Easter or at Whitsuntide,
But shines less gay for this!

XVIII.  THE TWO DESERTS.

Not greatly moved with awe am I
To learn that we may spy
Five thousand firmaments beyond our own. 
The best that’s known
Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small. 
View’d close, the Moon’s fair ball
Is of ill objects worst,
A corpse in Night’s highway, naked, fire-scarr’d, accurst;
And now they tell
That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst
Too horribly for hell. 
So, judging from these two,
As we must do,
The Universe, outside our living Earth,
Was all conceiv’d in the Creator’s mirth,
Forecasting at the time Man’s spirit deep,
To make dirt cheap. 
Put by the Telescope! 
Better without it man may see,
Stretch’d awful in the hush’d midnight,
The ghost of his eternity. 
Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye
The things which near us lie,
Till Science rapturously hails,
In the minutest water-drop,
A torment of innumerable tails. 
These at the least do live. 
But rather give
A mind not much to pry
Beyond our royal-fair estate
Betwixt these deserts blank of small and great. 
Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are,
Pressing to catch our gaze,
And out of obvious ways
Ne’er wandering far.

XIX.  CREST AND GULF.

Much woe that man befalls
Who does not run when sent, nor come when Heaven calls;
But whether he serve God, or his own whim,
Not matters, in the end, to any one but him;
And he as soon
Shall map the other side of the Moon,
As trace what his own deed,
In the next chop of the chance gale, shall breed. 
This he may know: 
His good or evil seed
Is like to grow,
For its first harvest, quite to contraries: 
The father wise
Has still the hare-brain’d brood;
’Gainst evil, ill example better works than good;
The poet, fanning his mild flight
At a most keen and arduous height,
Unveils the tender heavens to horny human eyes
Amidst ingenious blasphemies. 
Wouldst raise the poor, in Capuan luxury sunk? 
The Nation lives but whilst its Lords are drunk! 
Or spread Heav’n’s partial gifts o’er all, like dew? 
The Many’s weedy growth withers the gracious Few! 
Strange opposites, from those, again, shall rise. 
Join, then, if thee it please, the bitter jest
Of mankind’s progress; all its spectral race
Mere impotence of rest,
The heaving vain of life which cannot cease from self,