It might be perhaps easy to show the fallacy of this upbraiding, and prove the facts of the maintenance of life by the destruction of life which has always prevailed on earth; the facts that the python and the cobra, if not the tiger, and the eagle, slays, as man slays, for sport in addition to food; that in the depths of the unfathomed seas, and in the azure space of highest air, and in the green twilight of virgin forests, the god of cruelty reigns and prevails; that the elephant and the rhinoceros wrestled and the keen cheetah sprang on the meek cameleopard, and the jaws of the crocodile opened for the playful gazelle before ever the steel and the lead of the human brute touched and slew them. But when this has been said and admitted, it does not invalidate the truth of Satan's charge; that man has laid waste the earth and slaughtered for greed, for savage pleasure, for mere wantonness, as never any other creature before him or beside him on this planet, has done or has ever wished to do. To blast the harmless, gentle, colossal whale with the coward's tool of dynamite; to strip the fur coat off the living seal and drive her tender body over sharp rocks it was never made to cross; to castrate the lion and tear his flesh with red-hot irons that he may make the sport of fools; to rear the timid pheasant by millions, hand fed and unsuspecting, only that they may fall under the breechloaders of princes and lords and gentlemen; to penetrate into virgin forests and plunge in untroubled streams to seize the heron on her nest, and poison the lyre-bird in his haunts, and snatch his golden plumes from the bird of paradise, and his rosy wings from the flamingo, that commerce may flourish and women be adorned--all these things, and more like them, crimes of every clime and every hour, are human sins, and human sins alone; and justify in its strongest accusations the charge of Satan against Man as the most brutal murderer on earth; the same creature of destruction still, in the comedy which he calls civilisation, as when in his cave and his lake dwellings he first sharpened a stone, and then stole out to kill. And it is herein there lie alike the courage and the value of the 'Satan Absolved.' It is by no means a perfect poem; it would have been well if it had received much more meditation and amplification, if passages which approach the grotesque like the 'old world furniture,' the 'linen long in press' of Heaven in the first page had been altered; and the destiny and mission of Satan at the close are enwrapped in a mystery which is to me at least incomprehensible; but when the utmost has been said against it which can be urged, the poem remains a noble effort to proclaim a supreme truth, which, as all great truths have done, dawns slowly on the human mind--the solidarity of life.