At length, when their breath’s end was come about,
And both could now and then just gasp ‘impostor!’
  Holding their heads thrust menacingly out,
As staggering cocks keep up their fighting posture,
  The stranger smiled and said, ’Beyond a doubt
’Tis fortunate, my friends, that you have lost your 150
  United parts of speech, or it had been
  Impossible for me to get between.

  ’Produce! says Nature,—­what have you produced? 
A new strait-waistcoat for the human mind;
  Are you not limbed, nerved, jointed, arteried, juiced,
As other men? yet, faithless to your kind,
  Rather like noxious insects you are used
To puncture life’s fair fruit, beneath the rind
  Laying your creed-eggs, whence in time there spring
  Consumers new to eat and buzz and sting. 160

  ’Work! you have no conception how ’twill sweeten
Your views of Life and Nature, God and Man;
  Had you been forced to earn what you have eaten,
Your heaven had shown a less dyspeptic plan;
  At present your whole function is to eat ten
And talk ten times as rapidly as you can;
  Were your shape true to cosmogonic laws,
  You would be nothing but a pair of jaws.

  ’Of all the useless beings in creation
The earth could spare most easily you bakers 170
  Of little clay gods, formed in shape and fashion
Precisely in the image of their makers;
  Why it would almost move a saint to passion,
To see these blind and deaf, the hourly breakers
  Of God’s own image in their brother men,
  Set themselves up to tell the how, where, when,

  ’Of God’s existence; one’s digestion’s worse—­
So makes a god of vengeance and of blood;
  Another,—­but no matter, they reverse
Creation’s plan, out of their own vile mud 180
  Pat up a god, and burn, drown, hang, or curse
Whoever worships not; each keeps his stud
  Of texts which wait with saddle on and bridle
  To hunt down atheists to their ugly idol.

  ’This, I perceive, has been your occupation;
You should have been more usefully employed;
  All men are bound to earn their daily ration,
Where States make not that primal contract void
  By cramps and limits; simple devastation
Is the worm’s task, and what he has destroyed 190
  His monument; creating is man’s work,
  And that, too, something more than mist and murk.’

  So having said, the youth was seen no more,
And straightway our sage Brahmin, the philosopher,
  Cried, ’That was aimed at thee, thou endless bore,
Idle and useless as the growth of moss over
  A rotting tree-trunk!’ ’I would square that score
Full soon,’ replied the Dervise, ’could I cross over
  And catch thee by the beard.  Thy nails I’d trim
  And make thee work, as was advised by him. 200