These and, majestic in a borrowed shape,
     The major and the minor potentate,
     Creative of their various ape; —
     The tiptoe mortals triumphing to write
     Upon a perishable page
     An inch above their fellows’ height; —
     The criers of foregone wisdom, who impose
     Its slough on live conditions, much for the greed
     Of our first hungry figure wide agape; —
     Call up thy hounds of laughter to their run. 
     These, that would have men still of men be foes,
     Eternal fox to prowl and pike to feed;
     Would keep our life the whirly pool
     Of turbid stuff dishonouring History;
     The herd the drover’s herd, the fool the fool,
     Ourself our slavish self’s infernal sun: 
     These are the children of the heart untaught
     By thy quick founts to beat abroad, by thee
     Untamed to tone its passions under thought,
     The rich humaneness reading in thy fun. 
     Of them a world of coltish heels for school
     We have; a world with driving wrecks bestrewn.

     ’Tis written of the Gods of human mould,
     Those Nectar Gods, of glorious stature hewn
     To quicken hymns, that they did hear, incensed,
     Satiric comments overbold,
     From one whose part was by decree
     The jester’s; but they boiled to feel him bite. 
     Better for them had they with Reason fenced
     Or smiled corrected!  They in the great Gods’ might
     Their prober crushed, as fingers flea. 
     Crumbled Olympus when the sovereign sire
     His fatal kick to Momus gave, albeit
     Men could behold the sacred Mount aspire,
     The Satirist pass by on limping feet. 
     Those Gods who saw the ejected laugh alight
     Below had then their last of airy glee;
     They in the cup sought Laughter’s drowned sprite,
     Fed to dire fatness off uncurbed conceit. 
     Eyes under saw them waddle on their Mount,
     And drew them down; to flattest earth they rolled. 
     This know we veritable.  O Sage of Mirth! 
     Can it be true, the story men recount
     Of the fall’n plight of the great Gods on earth? 
     How they being deathless, though of human mould,
     With human cravings, undecaying frames,
     Must labour for subsistence; are a band
     Whom a loose-cheeked, wide-lipped gay cripple leads
     At haunts of holiday on summer sand: 
     And lightly he will hint to one that heeds
     Names in pained designation of them, names
     Ensphered on blue skies and on black, which twirl
     Our hearing madly from our seeing dazed,
     Add Bacchus unto both; and he entreats
     (His baby dimples in maternal chaps
     Running wild labyrinths of line and curl)
     Compassion for his masterful Trombone,
     Whose thunder is the brass of how he blazed
     Of old:  for him of the mountain-muscle feats,