f life laid up for the sons of the womb.
--I speak not of grovelling hearts, souls blind and begrimed from the
birth,
But the spirits of nobler strain, the elect of the children of earth:--
For the needle swerves from the pole; they cannot do what they would;
In their truest aim is falsehood, and ill out-balancing good.
Faith's first felicities fade; the world-mists thicken and roll,
'Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o'er-hazing the eye of the soul.
Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above us arise
The phantasmal figures of passion; earth's mirage exhaled to the skies.
And they go as the castled clouds o'er the verge when the tempest is
laid,
Towering Ambition, and Glory, and Self as Duty array'd:--
Idols no less than that idol whom lustful Ammon of yore
With the death-scream of children, a furnace of blood, was fain to adore!
So these, in the shrine of the soul, for a Moloch sacrifice cry,
The conscience of candid childhood, the pure directness of eye:--
Till the man yields himself to himself, accepting his will as his fate,
And the light from above within him is darkness; the darkness how great!

O Land whom the Gods,--loving most,--most sorely in wisdom have tried,
England! since Time was Time, thrice swept by the conqueror tide,
Why on thyself thrice turn, thrice crimson thy greenness in gore,
With the slain of thy children, as sheep, thy meadows whitening-o'er?
Race impatiently patient; tenacious of foe as of friend;
Slow to take flame; but, enflamed, that burns thyself out to the end:
Slow to return to the balance, once moved; not easily sway'd
From the centre, and, star-like, retracing thy orbit through sunlight and
shade!
--Without hate, without party affection, we now look back on the fray,
Through the mellowing magic of time the phantoms emerging to day!
Grasping too much for self, unjust to his rival in strife,
Each foe with good conscience and honour advances; war to the knife!
Lo, where with feebler hand the Stuart essays him to guide
The disdainful coursers of Henry, the Tudor car in its pride!
For he saw not the past was past; nor the swirl and inrush of the tide,
A nation arising in manhood; its will would no more be denied.
They would share in the labour and peril of State; they must perish or
win;
'Tis the instinct of Freedom that cries; a voice of Nature within!
Narrow the cry and sectarian oft: true sons of their age;
Justice avenged unjustly; yet more in sorrow than rage;
Ti