The ploughman in the loamy furrow sings, The sailor whistles as he reefs the sail, Blithe is the smith as the blows fall like hail From his huge hammer, and the stithy rings. Work is the sole and sovereign balm that brings Peace to the torpid soul when doubts assail, And sickening pleasures are of no avail To lull the torture of affliction's stings. Give me the work I love, the work I feel God in His Heaven has willed that I should do, And you may offer the whole commonweal, Lands, mansions, jewels, gold, and temples too, Vainly to me. By strenuous work alone Man mounts on Jacob's ladder to God's throne. XIII. SHELLEY.[36] 'Twas but a passing visit that he paid To the gross air of earth, this mystic seer, The tyrannies of sense were too severe For one of clay more fine than Adam's made. The inhumanity of man, the trade Of coining gold from the serf's groan and tear, The galling fetters of religious fear, And vain ecclesiastic masquerade Tortured his gentle soul, and made his life One bitter struggle with the powers that be: Yet not in vain he lived; his manful strife With all the deadening despotisms we see Will ring along the centuries, until Good has her final triumph over ill. [36] Suggested by a copy of his poems in a West Highland bookcase. XIV. PICTURE IN AN INN. A wood of pines through which the setting sun Pours from the western sky a parting flame, Beside the shore, a church called by the name Of some old saint whose pious race was run Long ere schismatic Luther had begun To work the Pope and his disciples shame. In earnest-seeming talk, a knight and dame Sit in a painted galley, rowed by one Whose back is to the setting orb of day. The soldier and his mate, their faces lit With all love's animation and the ray Of the down-lapsing globe of crimson, sit Together in the gilded vessel's prow, And there will sit for evermore, as now. XV. RAIN-STORM AT LOCH AWE. The topmost mountain-snows are melting fast, See, how the swollen waters hurry down In perpendicular runnels from the crown Of every wreathéd hill. The train has past Beside a dark stream into which are cast A hundred huddling rills whose foam is brown With pilfered soil. No dweller in a town Ever beheld such manifold and vast Torrents of roaring water. Each small isle Spaced on the loch, glooms through the hanging haze Like a dream-picture, and for many a mile Beneath those clouds that lean upon the braes Encompassing Loch Awe, the watery plain Is pricked with million lances of the rain. XVI. KINLOCHEWE.