Among the perjured Scythian’s shaggy horde,
     The hydrocephalic aerolite
     Had taken; flashing thence repellent teeth,
     Though Europe’s Master Europe’s Rebel banned
     To be earth’s outcast, ocean’s lord and sport.

     Unmoved might seem the Master’s taunted sword. 
     Northward his dusky legions nightly slipped,
     As on the map of that all-provident head;
     He luting Peace the while, like morning’s cock
     The quiet day to round the hours for bed;
     No pastoral shepherd sweeter to his flock. 
     Then Europe first beheld her Titan stripped. 
     To what vast length of limb and mounds of thews,
     How trained to scale the eminences, pluck
     The hazards for new footing, how compel
     Those timely incidents by men named luck,
     Through forethought that defied the Fates to choose,
     Her grovelling admiration had not yet
     Imagined of the great man-miracle;
     And France recounted with her comic smile
     Duplicities of Court and Cabinet,
     The silky female of his male in guile,
     Wherewith her two-faced Master could amuse
     A dupe he charmed in sunny beams to bask,
     Before his feint for camisado struck
     The lightning moment of the cast-off mask.

     Splendours of earth repeating heaven’s at set
     Of sun down mountain cloud in masses arched;
     Since Asia upon Europe marched,
     Unmatched the copious multitudes; unknown
     To Gallia’s over-runner, Rome’s inveterate foe,
     Such hosts; all one machine for overthrow,
     Coruscant from the Master’s hand, compact
     As reasoned thoughts in the Master’s head; were shown
     Yon lightning moment when his acme might
     Blazed o’er the stream that cuts the sandy tract
     Borussian from Sarmatia’s famished flat;
     The century’s flower; and off its pinnacled throne,
     Rayed servitude on Europe’s ball of sight.

     XII

     Behind the Northern curtain-folds he passed. 
     There heard hushed France her muffled heart beat fast
     Against the hollow ear-drum, where she sat
     In expectation’s darkness, until cracked
     The straining curtain-seams:  a scaly light
     Was ghost above an army under shroud. 
     Imperious on Imperial Fact
     Incestuously the incredible begat. 
     His veterans and auxiliaries,
     The trained, the trustful, sanguine, proud,
     Princely, scarce numerable to recite, —
     Titanic of all Titan tragedies! —
     That Northern curtain took them, as the seas
     Gulp the great ships to give back shipmen white.

     Alive in marble, she conceived in soul,
     With barren eyes and mouth, the mother’s loss;
     The bolt from her abandoned heaven sped;
     The snowy army rolling knoll on knoll
     Beyond horizon, under no blest Cross: 
     By the vulture dotted and engarlanded.