Yea, truth and justice then
        Will down return to men,
    Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
        Mercy will sit between,
        Throned in celestial sheen,
    With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering;
      And heaven, as at some festival,
  Will open wide the gates of her high palace-hall.

        But wisest Fate says “No;
        This must not yet be so.” 
    The babe lies yet in smiling infancy,
        That on the bitter cross
        Must redeem our loss,
    So both himself and us to glorify. 
      Yet first, to those y-chained in sleep,
  The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,

        With such a horrid clang
        As on Mount Sinai rang,
    While the red fire and smouldering clouds outbrake: 
        The aged earth, aghast
        With terror of that blast,
    Shall from the surface to the centre shake,
      When, at the world’s last sessioen,
  The dreadful Judge in middle air shall spread his throne.

        And then at last our bliss
        Full and perfect is: 
    But now begins; for from this happy day,
        The old dragon, under ground
        In straiter limits bound,
    Not half so far casts his usurped sway;
      And, wroth to see his kingdom fail,
  Swinges[120] the scaly horror of his folded tail.[121]

        The oracles are dumb:[122]
        No voice or hideous hum
    Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving;
        Apollo from his shrine
        Can no more divine,
    With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving;
      No nightly trance, or breathed spell,
  Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

        The lonely mountains o’er,
        And the resounding shore,
    A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
        From haunted spring and dale,
        Edged with poplar pale,
    The parting genius[123] is with sighing sent;
      With flower-inwoven tresses torn,
  The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

        In consecrated earth,
        And on the holy hearth,
    The Lars and Lemures[124] moan with midnight plaint;
        In urns and altars round,
        A drear and dying sound
    Affrights the flamens[125] at their service quaint;
      And the chill marble seems to sweat,
  While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat.

        Peor and Baaelim
        Forsake their temples dim,
    With that twice-battered god of Palestine;
        And mooned Ashtaroth, the Assyrian Venus. 
        Heaven’s queen and mother both,
    Now sits not girt with tapers’ holy shine;
      The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn;[126]
  In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz[127] mourn.