Beyond; a crater in each eye, 100
Sways brown, broad-shouldered PILLSBURY,
Who tears up words like trees by the roots,
A Theseus in stout cow-hide boots,
The wager of eternal war
Against that loathsome Minotaur
To whom we sacrifice each year
The best blood of our Athens here,
(Dear M., pray brush up your Lempriere.)
A terrible denouncer he,
Old Sinai burns unquenchably 110
Upon his lips; he well might be a
Hot-blazing soul from fierce Judea,
Habakkuk, Ezra, or Hosea. 
His words are red hot iron searers,
And nightmare-like he mounts his hearers,
Spurring them like avenging Fate, or
As Waterton his alligator.

Hard by, as calm as summer even,
Smiles the reviled and pelted STEPHEN,
The unappeasable Boanerges 120
To all the Churches and the Clergies,
The grim savant who, to complete
His own peculiar cabinet,
Contrived to label ’mong his kicks
One from the followers of Hicks;
Who studied mineralogy
Not with soft book upon the knee,
But learned the properties of stones
By contact sharp of flesh and bones,
And made the experimentum crucis 130
With his own body’s vital juices;
A man with caoutchouc endurance,
A perfect gem for life insurance,
A kind of maddened John the Baptist,
To whom the harshest word comes aptest,
Who, struck by stone or brick ill-starred,
Hurls back an epithet as hard,
Which, deadlier than stone or brick,
Has a propensity to stick. 
His oratory is like the scream 140
Of the iron-horse’s frenzied steam
Which warns the world to leave wide space
For the black engine’s swerveless race. 
Ye men with neckcloths white, I warn you—­
Habet a whole haymow in cornu.

A Judith, there, turned Quakeress,
Sits ABBY in her modest dress,
Serving a table quietly,
As if that mild and downcast eye
Flashed never, with its scorn intense, 150
More than Medea’s eloquence. 
So the same force which shakes its dread
Far-blazing blocks o’er AEtna’s head,
Along the wires in silence fares
And messages of commerce bears. 
No nobler gift of heart and brain,
No life more white from spot or stain,
Was e’er on Freedom’s altar laid
Than hers, the simple Quaker maid.

These last three (leaving in the lurch 160
Some other themes) assault the Church,
Who therefore writes them in her lists
As Satan’s limbs and atheists;
For each sect has one argument
Whereby the rest to hell are sent,
Which serve them like the Graiae’s tooth,
Passed round in turn from mouth to mouth;—­
If any ism should arise,
Then look on it with constable’s eyes, 169
Tie round its neck a heavy athe-,
And give it kittens’ hydropathy. 
This trick with other (useful very) tricks
Is laid to the Babylonian meretrix,
But ’twas in vogue before her day
Wherever priesthoods had their way,
And Buddha’s Popes with this struck dumb
The followers of Fi and Fum.