ld,
Blinking and bleared and blinded by the light;
Those hands, that late a royal scepter bore,
Shaking with fear and dripping all with blood.
And as he looked that some should give him place
And lead him to a seat for monarchs fit,
He only saw a group of innocents
His hands had slain, now clothed in spotless white,
From whom he fled as if by furies chased,
Fled from those groves and gardens of delight,
Fled on and down a broad and beaten road
By many trod, and toward a desert waste
With distance dim, and gloomy, grim and vast,
Where piercing thorns and leafless briars grow,
And dead sea-apples, ashes to the taste,
Where loathsome reptiles crawl and hiss and sting,
And birds of night and bat-winged dragons fly,
Where beetling cliffs seem threatening instant fall,
And opening chasms seem yawning to devour,
And sulphurous seas were swept with lurid flames
That seethe and boil from hidden fires below.

Again he saw, beyond that silent vale,
One frail and old, without a rich man's gate
Laid down to die beneath a peepul-tree,
And parched with thirst and pierced with sudden pain,
A root his pillow and the earth his bed;
Alone he met the King of terrors there;
Whose wasting body, cumbering now the ground,
Chandalas cast upon the passing stream
To float and fester in the fiery sun,
Till whirled by eddies, caught by roots, it lay
A prey for vultures and for fishes food.

That selfsame day a dart of deadly pain
Shot through that rich man's hard, unfeeling heart,
That laid him low, beyond the power to save,
E'en while his servants cast without his gates
That poor old man, who came to beg him spare
His roof-tree, where his fathers all had died,
His hearth, the shrine of all his inmost joys,
His little home, to every heart so dear;
And in due season tongues of hissing flames
That rich man's robes like snowflakes whirled in air,
And curled his crackling skin, consumed his flesh,
And sucked the marrow from his whitened bones.

But here these two their places seem to change.
That rich man's houses, lands, and flocks and herds,
His servants, rich apparel, stores of gold,
And all he loved and lived for left behind,
The friends that nature gave him turned to foes,
Dependents whom his greed had wronged and crushed
Shrinking away as from a deadly foe;
No generous wish, no gentle, tender, thought
To hide his nakedness, hi