With eye averted and an anguished frown, Loathingly glides the Muse through scenes of strife, Where, like the heart of Vengeance up and down, Throbs in its framework the blood-muffled knife; Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feet Turn never backward: hers no bloody glare; Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet, And where it enters there is no despair: Not first on palace and cathedral spire Quivers and gleams that unconsuming fire; While these stand black against her morning skies, The peasant sees it leap from peak to peak Along his hills; the craftsman's burning eyes Own with cool tears its influence mother-meek; It lights the poet's heart up like a star;-- Ah! while the tyrant deemed it still afar, And twined with golden threads his futile snare, That swift, convicting glow all round him ran; 'Twas close beside him there, Sunrise whose Memnon is the soul of man. V. O Broker-King, is this thy wisdom's fruit? A dynasty plucked out as 't were a weed Grown rankly in a night, that leaves no seed! Could eighteen years strike down no deeper root? But now thy vulture eye was turned on Spain,-- A shout from Paris, and thy crown falls off, Thy race has ceased to reign, And thou become a fugitive and scoff: Slippery the feet that mount by stairs of gold, And weakest of all fences one of steel;-- Go and keep school again like him of old, The Syracusan tyrant;--thou mayst feel Royal amid a birch-swayed commonweal! VI. Not long can he be ruler who allows His time to run before him; thou wast naught Soon as the strip of gold about thy brows Was no more emblem of the People's thought: Vain were thy bayonets against the foe Thou hadst to cope with; thou didst wage War not with Frenchmen merely;--no, Thy strife was with the Spirit of the Age, The invisible Spirit whose first breath divine Scattered thy frail endeavor, And, like poor last year's leaves, whirled thee and thine Into the Dark forever! VII.