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     In the deep circle of Siddim hast thou seen,
     Under the shining skies of Palestine,
     The sinister glitter of the Lake of Asphalt? 
     Those coasts, strewn thick with ashes of damnation,
     Forever foe to every living thing,
     Where rings the cry of the lost wandering bird
     That on the shore of the perfidious sea
     Athirsting dies,—­that watery sepulchre
     Of the five cities of iniquity,
     Where even the tempest, when its clouds hang low,
     Passes in silence, and the lightning dies,—­
     If thou hast seen them, bitterly hath been
     Thy heart wrung with the misery and despair
     Of that dread vision! 
                           Yet there is on earth
     A woe more desperate and miserable,—­
     A spectacle wherein the wrath of God
     Avenges Him more terribly.  It is
     A vain, weak people of faint-heart old men,
     That, for three hundred years of dull repose,
     Has lain perpetual dreamer, folded in
     The ragged purple of its ancestors,
     Stretching its limbs wide in its country’s sun,
     To warm them; drinking the soft airs of autumn
     Forgetful, on the fields where its forefathers
     Like lions fought!  From overflowing hands,
     Strew we with hellebore and poppies thick
     The way.

     From ‘The Primal Histories.’

     THE HARVESTERS

     What time in summer, sad with so much light,
     The sun beats ceaselessly upon the fields;
     The harvesters, as famine urges them,
     Draw hitherward in thousands, and they wear
     The look of those that dolorously go
     In exile, and already their brown eyes
     Are heavy with the poison of the air. 
     Here never note of amorous bird consoles
     Their drooping hearts; here never the gay songs
     Of their Abruzzi sound to gladden these
     Pathetic hands.  But taciturn they toil,
     Reaping the harvests for their unknowrn lords;
     And when the weary labor is performed,
     Taciturn they retire; and not till then
     Their bagpipes crown the joys of the return,
     Swelling the heart with their familiar strain. 
     Alas! not all return, for there is one
     That dying in the furrow sits, and seeks
     With his last look some faithful kinsman out,
     To give his life’s wage, that he carry it
     Unto his trembling mother, with the last
     Words of her son that comes no more.  And dying,
     Deserted and alone, far off he hears
     His comrades going, with their pipes in time,
     Joyfully measuring their homeward steps. 
     And when in after years an orphan comes
     To reap the harvest here, and feels his blade
     Go quivering through the swaths of falling grain,
     He weeps and thinks—­haply these heavy stalks
     Ripened on his unburied father’s bones.