They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are: Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war. —My sister, as I read them in my glass, Their field of tares they take for pasture grass. How waken them that have not any bent Save browsing—the concrete indifferent! Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff: They fear not for the race when full the trough. They have much fear of giving up the ghost; And these are of mankind the unnumbered host. —If I could see with you, and did not faint In beating wing, the future I would paint. Those massed indifferents will learn to quake: Now meanwhile is another mass awake, Once denser than the grunters of the sty. If I could see with you! Could I but fly! —The length of days that you with them have housed, An outcast else, approves their cause espoused. —O true, they have a cause, and woe for us, While still they have a cause too piteous! Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined, They walk no longer with a stumbler blind, And quicken in the virtue of their cause, To think me a poor mouther of old saws! I wait the issue of a battling Age; The toilers with your ‘troughsters’ now engage; Instructing them, through their acutest sense, How close the dangers of indifference! Already have my people shown their worth, More love they light, which folds the love of Earth. That love to love of labour leads: thence love Of humankind—earth’s incense flung above. —Admit some other features: Faithless, mean; Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene; Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles; And if I bid it face what _I_ observe, Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!