Combustibles on hot combustibles Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire The mountain-torrent of infernal ire And leave the track of devils where men built.  Perceptive of a doom, the sinner’s guilt Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud, If drops the chillness of a passing cloud, To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:  None save they but the souls which them contain.  No extramural God, the God within Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.  A world that for the spur of fool and knave Sweats in its laboratory what shall save?  But men who ply their wits in such a school Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.

— Much have I studied hard Necessity!  To know her Wisdom’s mother, and that we May deem the harshness of her later cries In labour a sure goad to prick the wise, If men among the warnings which convulse Can gravely dread without the craven’s pulse.  Long ere the rising of this age of ours, The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.  Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring, And are as lasting as the parent thing.  Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill, They might o’ermatch and have mankind at will.  Behold such army gathering; ours the spur, No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.  Not fool or knave is now the enemy O’ershadowing men, ’tis Folly, Knavery!  A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.  Now must the brother soul alive in each His traitorous individual devildom Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.  Dimly men see it menacing apace To overthrow, perchance uproot, the race.  Within, without, they are a field of tares:  Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares, And wherefore warrior service they must yield, Shines visible as life on either field.  That is my comfort, following shock on shock, Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.  Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night, Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight, Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect, The human and Satanic intellect, Determined for their uses to control What forces on the earth and under roll, Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.  They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:  Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.

— My sister, as I read them in my glass, Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.  How waken them that have not any bent Save browsing—­the concrete indifferent!  Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:  They fear not for the race when full the trough.  They have much fear of giving up the ghost; And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.

— If I could see with you, and did not faint In beating wing, the future I would paint.  Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:  Now meanwhile is another mass awake, Once denser than the grunters of the sty.  If I could see with you!  Could I but fly!

     — The length of days that you with them have housed,
     An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.