Their pityless tread lies torn and trampled, where Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth. Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites, Without a hope, a passion, or a love, Who, through a life of luxury and lies, Have crept by flattery to the seats of power,
Support the system whence their honours flow.... They have three words: well tyrants know their use, Well pay them for the loan, with usury
Torn from a bleeding world!-God, Hell, and Heaven, A vengeful, pityless, and almighty fiend, Whose mercy is a nick-name for the rage Of tameless tigers hungering for blood. Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire,
Where poisonous and undying worms prolong Eternal misery to those hapless slaves
Whose life has been a penance for its crimes. And Heaven, a meed for those who dare belie Their human nature, quake, believe and cringe Before the mockeries of earthly power.
These tools the tyrant tempers to his work, Wields in his wrath, and as he wills destroys, Omnipotent in wickedness: the while
Youth springs, age moulders, manhood tamely does His bidding, bribed by short-lived joys to lend Force to the weakness of his trembling arm.
They rise, they fall: one generation comes Yielding its harvest to destruction's scythe. It fades, another blossoms: yet, behold! Red glows the tyrant's stamp-mark on its bloom, Withering and cankering deep its passive prime He has invented lying words and modes, Empty and vain as his own coreless heart; Evasive meanings, nothings of much sound, To lure the heedless victim to the toils Spread round the valley of its paradise.
Look to thyself, priest, conqueror, or prince! Whether thy trade is falsehood, and thy lusts Deep wallow in the earnings of the poor,
With whom thy master was; or thou delight'st In numbering o'er the myriads of thy slain, All misery weighing nothing in the scale Against thy short-lived fame; or thou dost load With cowardice and crime the groaning land. A pomp-fed king-look to thy wretched self! Ay, art thou not the veriest slave that e'er Crawled on the loathing earth? Are not thy days Days of unsatisfying listlessness?
Dost thou not cry, ere night's long rack is o'er, When will the morning come? Is not thy youth A vain and feverish dream of sensualism? Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease? Are not thy views of unregretted death Drear, comfortless, and horrible? Thy mind, Is it not morbid as thy nerveless frame, Incapable of judgment, hope, or love? And dost thou wish the errors to survive That bar thee from all sympathies of good, After the miserable interest
Thou hold'st in their protraction? When the grave Has swallowed up thy memory and thyself, Dost thou desire the bane that poisons earth To twine its roots around thy coffined clay, Spring from thy bones, and blossom on thy tomb, That of its fruit thy babes may eat and die?
THUS do the generations of the earth Go to the grave, and issue from the womb, Surviving still the imperishable change That renovates the world; even as the leaves Which the keen frost-wind of the waning year Has scattered on the forest soil, and heaped For many seasons there, though long they choke, Loading with loathsome rottenness the land. All germs of promise. Yet, when the tall trees From which they fell, shorn of their lovely shapes,
Lie level with the earth to moulder there, They fertilize the land they long deformed, Till from the breathing lawn a forest springs Of youth, integrity, and loveliness,
Like that which gave it life, to spring and die. Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights The fairest feelings of the opening heart, Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love, And judgment cease to wage unnatural war With passion's unsubduable array.
Twin-sisters of religion, Selfishness! Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all The wanton horrors of her bloody play; Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless, Shunning the light, and owning not its name, Compelled, by its deformity, to screen With flimsy veil of justice and of right Its unattractive lineaments, that scare All, save the brood of ignorance: at once The cause and the effect of tyranny; Unblushing, ardent, sensual, and vile; Dead to all love but of its abjectness, With heart impassive by more noble powers Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame; Despising its own miserable being,
Which still it longs yet fears to disenthral.
Hence commerce springs, the venal interchange Of all that human heart or nature yields;
Which wealth should purchase not, but want demand, And natural kindness hasten to supply
From the full fountain of its boundless love,
For ever stifled, drained, and tainted now.
Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shane No solitary virtue dares to spring, But poverty and wealth with equal hand Scatter their withering curses, and unfold The doors of premature and violent death To pining famine and full fed disease,
To all that shares the lot of human life,
Which poisoned body and soul scarce drags the chain That lengthens as it goes, and clanks behind.
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, The signet of its all-enslaving power Upon a shining ore, and called it gold; Before whose image bow the vulgar great, The vainly rich, the miserable proud,
The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, And with blind feelings reverence the power That grinds them to the dust of misery. But in the temple of their hireling hearts Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn All earthly things but virtue.
Since tyrants, by the sale of human life, Heap luxuries to their sensualism, and fame To their wide wasting and insatiate pride, Success has sanctioned to a credulous world The ruin, the disgrace, the woe, of war. His hosts of blind and unresisting dupes The despot numbers; from his cabinet These puppets of his schemes he moves at will, Even as the slaves by force or famine driven, Beneath a vulgar master, to perform
A task of cold and brutal drudgery ;- Hardened to hope, insensible to fear, Scarce living pullies of a dead machine,
Mere wheels of work and articles of trade,
That grace the proud and noisy pomp of wealth!
The harmony and happiness of man
Yield to the wealth of nations; that which lifts His nature to the heaven of its pride
Is bartered for the poison of his soul;
The weight that drags to earth his towering hopes, Blighting all prospect but of selfish gain, Withering all passion but of slavish fear, Extinguishing all free and generous love Of enterprise and daring; even the pulse
That fancy kindles in the beating heart To mingle with sensation, it destroys,- Leaves nothing but the sordid lust of self, The groveling hope of interest and gold, Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed Even by hypocrisy.
And statesmen boast
Of wealth! The wordy eloquence that lives After the ruin of their hearts can gild The bitter poison of a nation's woe, Can turn the worship of the servile mob To their corrupt and glaring idol, fame, From virtue, trampled by its iron tread, Although its dazzling pedestal be raised Amid the horrors of a limb-strewn field, With desolated dwellings smoking round. The man of ease, who, by his warm fire-side, To deeds of charitable intercourse And bare fulfilment of the common laws Of decency and prejudice, confines The struggling nature of his human heart, Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds A passing tear perchance upon the wreck Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling's door The frightful waves are driven,-when his son Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion
Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man, Whose life is misery, and fear, and care; Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil; Who ever hears his famished offspring scream, Whom their pale mother's uncomplaining gaze For ever meets, and the proud rich man's eye Flashing command, and the heart-breaking scene Of thousands like himself;-he little heeds The rhetoric of tyranny; his hate
Is quenchless as his wrongs; he laughs to scorn The vain and bitter mockery of words, Feeling the horror of the tyrant's deeds, And unrestrained but by the arm of power, That knows and dreads his enmity.
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