Who boast their coward skill to plant the balls that fly, Thy work of all time spoiled, their only use to die That these sad clowns may laugh. Nay, Lord, we weep for Thee, And spend ourselves in tears for Thy marred majesty. Behold, Lord, what we bring,--this last proof in our hands, Their latest fiendliest spoil from Thy fair tropic-lands, The birds of all the Earth, unwinged to deck the heads Of their unseemly women: plumage of such reds As not the sunset teach, such purples as no throne, Not even in heaven showeth, hardly, Lord, Thine own; Such azures as the sea's, such greens as are in spring The oak trees' tenderest buds of watched-for blossoming, Such opalescent pearls as only in Thy skies The lunar bow revealeth to night's sleep-tired eyes. Behold them, Lord of Beauty, Lord of Reverence, Lord of Compassion, Thou who metest means to ends, Nor madest Thy world fair for less than Thine own fame, Behold Thy birds of joy, lost, tortured, put to shame, For these vile strumpets' whim. Arise, or cease to be Judge of the quick and dead! These dead wings cry to Thee, Arise, Lord, and avenge!' The use of the six-foot Alexandrine couplet may seem to many readers as a thing unknown and unwelcome in English verse. Others may say that here and there the language has not been sufficiently carefully weighed, that there is repetition of thought in some places, and of words in others, as for instance the word 'plain' recurs three times in seven lines. But when hypercriticism has said and done its worst, the work remains a just and generous indictment; heroic in its courage and vigorous in its eloquence, pleading the cause of those who cannot plead their own. The human race will be ill-pleased by the denunciation; for their vanity must be wounded by one who incessantly reminds it of its kinship to 'the lewd, bare-buttocked ape,' and who calls it full rightly, 'sad creature without shame,' and calls it also:-- 'A presence saturnine, In stealth among the rest, equipped as none of these With Thy mind's attributes, low crouched beneath the trees, Betraying all and each. * * * * * 'The red Japhetic stock of the bare plains, which rolled A base-born horde on Rome erewhile in lust of gold, Tide following tide, the Goth, Gaul, Vandal, Lombard, Hun, Spewed forth from the white North, to new dominion In the fair Southern lands, with famine at their heel And rapine in their van, armed to the lips with steel. * * * * * 'The master-wolf of all men call the Sassenach, The Anglo-Norman dog who goeth by land and sea, As his forefathers went in chartered piracy, Death, fire, in his right hand.' Again, who, in the vain-glorious Britain of our time, will pardon this?--