Nor marvel France should veil a seer’s face, And call on darkness as a blest retreat. Magnanimously could her iron Emperor Confront submission: hostile stirred to heat All his vast enginery, allowed no halt Up withered avenues of waste-blood war, To the pitiless red mounts of fire afume, As ’twere the world’s arteries opened! Woe the race! Ask wherefore Fortune’s vile caprice should balk His panther spring across the foaming salt, From martial sands to the cliffs of pallid chalk! There is no answer: seed of black defeat She then did sow, and France nigh unto death foredoom. See since that Seaman’s epicycle sprite Engirdle, lure and goad him to the chase Along drear leagues of crimson spotting white With mother’s tears of France, that he may meet Behind suborned battalions, ranked as wheat Where peeps the weedy poppy, him of the sea; Earth’s power to baffle Ocean’s power resume; Victorious army crown o’er Victory’s fleet; And bearing low that Seaman upon knee, Stay the vexed question of supremacy, Obnoxious in the vault by Frederic’s tomb. VIII Poured streams of Europe’s veins the flood Full Rhine or Danube rolls off morning-tide Through shadowed reaches into crimson-dyed: And Rhine and Danube knew her gush of blood Down the plucked roots the deepest in her breast. He tossed her cordials, from his laurels pressed. She drank for dryness thirstily, praised his gifts. The blooded frame a powerful draught uplifts Writhed the devotedness her voice rang wide In cries ecstatic, as of the martyr-Blest, Their spirits issuing forth of bodies racked, And crazy chuckles, with life’s tears at feud; While near her heart the sunken sentinel Called Critic marked, and dumb in awe reviewed This torture, this anointed, this untracked To mortal source, this alien of his kind; Creator, slayer, conjuror, Solon-Mars, The cataract of the abyss, the star of stars; Whose arts to lay the senses under spell Aroused an insurrectionary mind. IX