and blind,—­ 210
    Scarce less than thou, a pitiable thing
    To be down-trodden into darkness soon. 
    But now I am above thee, for thou art
    The bungling workmanship of fear, the block
    That awes the swart Barbarian; but I 215
    Am what myself have made,—­a nature wise
    With finding in itself the types of all,—­
    With watching from the dim verge of the time
    What things to be are visible in the gleams
    Thrown forward on them from the luminous past,—­ 220
    Wise with the history of its own frail heart,
    With reverence and with sorrow, and with love,
    Broad as the world, for freedom and for man.

      Thou and all strength shall crumble, except Love,
    By whom, and for whose glory, ye shall cease:  225
    And, when thou art but a dim moaning heard
    From out the pitiless gloom of Chaos, I
    Shall be a power and a memory,
    A name to fright all tyrants with, a light
    Unsetting as the pole-star, a great voice 230
    Heard in the breathless pauses of the fight
    By truth and freedom ever waged with wrong,
    Clear as a silver trumpet, to awake
    Huge echoes that from age to age live on
    In kindred spirits, giving them a sense 235
    Of boundless power from boundless suffering wrung: 
    And many a glazing eye shall smile to see
    The memory of my triumph (for to meet
    Wrong with endurance, and to overcome
    The present with a heart that looks beyond, 240
    Are triumph), like a prophet eagle, perch
    Upon the sacred banner of the Right. 
    Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed,
    And feeds the green earth with its swift decay,
    Leaving it richer for the growth of truth; 245
    But Good, once put in action or in thought,
    Like a strong oak, doth from its boughs shed down
    The ripe germs of a forest.  Thou, weak god,
    Shalt fade and be forgotten! but this soul,
    Fresh-living still in the serene abyss, 250
    In every heaving shall partake, that grows
    From heart to heart among the sons of men,—­
    As the ominous hum before the earthquake runs
    Far through the AEgean from roused isle to isle,—­
    Foreboding wreck to palaces and shrines, 255
    And mighty rents in many a cavernous error
    That darkens the free light to man:—­This heart,
    Unscarred by thy grim vulture, as the truth
    Grows but more lovely ’neath the beaks and claws
    Of Harpies blind that fain would soil it, shall 260
    In all the throbbing exultations share
    That wait on freedom’s triumphs, and in all