'Tis success that attracts: 'twas therefore so many workers Ran pellmell to the schools of Nature in our generation, 320 While other employments have lack'd their genius and pined. Our fathers' likings wē thought semibarbarous, our art Self-consciously sickens in qualms of an æsthetic aura, Noisily in the shallows splashing and disporting uninspir'd. Our famed vulgarities whether in speech, taste or amusement, Are not amended: Is it foolish, hoping for a rescue, First to appeal to the strong, for health to the healthy amongst us? --For the Sophists' doctrine that GRACE is dying of old age I hold in derision, their inkpot thēories of man, Of his cradle of art, his deathbed of algebra;--and see 330 How Scīence has wrought, since we went idling at Eton, One thing above surmise:--An' if I may dare to remind you How Vergil praises your lov'd Lucretius, (of whom My matter and metre[v]have set you thinking, as I fear,) In that glory which ends 'et inexorabile fatum Subjecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari': Sounded not most empty to us such boast of a pagan, Strangely to us tutor'd to believe, with faith mediæval, Torture everlasting to be justly the portion of all souls, Nor but by the elects' secret prēdestiny escaped? 340 If you think to reply,--making this question in answer,-- 'Did the belief disturb for a moment our pleasure in life?' No.--And men gather in harvest on slopes of an active Volcano: natheless the terror's ēnormity was there; Now 'tis away: Scīence has pierced man's cloudy common-sense, Dow'rd his homely vision with more expansive an embrace, And the rotten foundation of old superstition exposed. That trouble of Pascal, those vain paradoxes of Austin, Those Semitic parables of Paul, those tomes of Aquinas, All are thrown to the limbo of antediluvian idols, 350 Only because we learn mankind's true history, and know That not at all from a high perfection sinfully man fell, But from baseness arose: We have with sympathy enter'd Those dark caves, his joyless abodes, where with ravening brutes, Bear or filthy hyena, he once disputed a shelter:-- That was his Paradise, his garden of Eden,--abandon'd Ages since to the drift and drip, the cementing accretions Whence we now separate his bones buried in the stalagma, His household makeshifts, his hunting tools, his adornments, From the scatter'd skeletons of a lost prehistoric order, 360 Its mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, the machairodos, and beasts Whose unnamed pastures the immense Atlantic inundates. In what corner of earth lie not dispersed the familiar Flinty relics of his old primitive stone-cutlery? what child Kens not now the design, the adapted structure of each one