'Vile as thou art, ofttimes in thee have met Mercy and Truth--and Peace and Righteousness Have kissed each other; and thine heart is set Ofttimes to follow what is just, redress Where thou hast trespassed, rendering; ofttimes, too, Forgiving other's trespass: to distress Thou grudgest not its sympathetic due Of kindly deed, or word, or mutual tears, Nor in vain wholly labourest to subdue The hydra host whose foul miasm blears Thy vision, and the distant gleam obscures That dimly through thy prison casement peers. E'en to the darkened dungeon that immures Thy soul, some feeble glimmer finds its way. Crushed beneath earthly durance, still endures Some lingering fire below that weight of clay, Some generous zeal, some honest hardihood, Some faith--some charity.--And whence are they? If not of Him whose quickening breath endued All things with life,--and, when he looked upon What He had made, beheld that all was good: All good,--but chiefly man, in whom alone Some likeness of Himself--some clouded light, From His own countenance reflected, shone. Doth not the sun outshine the satellite? And shall not He who in the murkiest hour Of sin's defilement, streaks thy dreary night With beams that bid thee, lower yet and lower Descending, hope, perchance, to rise again,-- Say--shall not He in holiness as power Transcend the creature whom His gifts sustain! And here, if sneering casuist blaspheme, And to divided nature's sovereign, Ascribe, in nature's opposite extreme Like eminence, and nature's God aver In evil, even as in good, supreme,-- Heed not, or ask if man's Artificer With His own work, in virtue matched, can prove At once more holy and unholier? 'Yet since all good is fruit of love, and love Worketh no ill, how still doth ill abound? Is't haply that with love a rival strove?