— O true, they have a cause, and woe for us, While still they have a cause too piteous!  Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined, They walk no longer with a stumbler blind, And quicken in the virtue of their cause, To think me a poor mouther of old saws!  I wait the issue of a battling Age; The toilers with your ‘troughsters’ now engage; Instructing them, through their acutest sense, How close the dangers of indifference!  Already have my people shown their worth, More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.  That love to love of labour leads:  thence love Of humankind—­earth’s incense flung above.

— Admit some other features:  Faithless, mean; Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene; Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles; And if I bid it face what I observe, Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!

— Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil, Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:  Disowned them as the unholiest of Time, Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.  Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:  As little as Time’s earliest knew the sky.  Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flame At intervals, in proof of whom they came.  To strengthen our foundations is the task Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask, Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.  My sister sees no round beyond her mood; To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.  Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves, It moves:  O much for me to say it moves!  About his AEthiop Highlands Nile is Nile, Though not the stream of the paternal smile:  And where his tide of nourishment he drives, An Abyssinian wantonness revives.  Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims; He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs, The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills; Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.  To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers, He is the vast Insensate who devours His golden promise over leagues of seed, Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.  The races which on barbarous force begin Inherit onward of their origin, And cancelled blessings will the current length Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.  ’Tis not in men to recognize the need Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.  Then may sharp suffering their nature grind; Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.  Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed, For tens up the safe mountains at his head.  Few would be fed, not far his course prolong, Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong. — That rings of truth!  More do your people thrive; Your Many are more merrily alive Than erewhile when I gloried in the page Of radiant singer and anointed sage.  Greece was my lamp:  burnt out for lack of oil; Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!  All structures built upon a narrow space Must fall, from having