from the beginning.  I am come to speak
Thy praises.  True it is, that I have wept
Thy conquests, and may weep them yet again: 
And thou from some I love wilt take a life
Dear to me as my own.  Yet while the spell
Is on my spirit, and I talk with thee
In sight of all thy trophies, face to face,
Meet is it that my voice should utter forth
Thy nobler triumphs; I will teach the world
To thank thee.—­Who are thine accusers?—­Who? 
The living!—­they who never felt thy power,
And know thee not.  The curses of the wretch
Whose crimes are ripe, his sufferings when thy hand
Is on him, and the hour he dreads is come,
Are writ among thy praises.  But the good—­
Does he whom thy kind hand dismissed to peace,
Upbraid the gentle violence that took off
His fetters, and unbarred his prison cell?

Raise then the hymn to Death.  Deliverer! 
God hath anointed thee to free the oppressed
And crush the oppressor.  When the armed chief,
The conqueror of nations, walks the world,
And it is changed beneath his feet, and all
Its kingdoms melt into one mighty realm—­
Thou, while his head is loftiest and his heart
Blasphemes, imagining his own right hand
Almighty, thou dost set thy sudden grasp
Upon him, and the links of that strong chain
That bound mankind are crumbled; thou dost break
Sceptre and crown, and beat his throne to dust. 
Then the earth shouts with gladness, and her tribes
Gather within their ancient bounds again. 
Else had the mighty of the olden time,
Nimrod, Sesostris, or the youth who feigned
His birth from Libyan Ammon, smitten yet
The nations with a rod of iron, and driven
Their chariot o’er our necks.  Thou dost avenge,
In thy good time, the wrongs of those who know
No other friend.  Nor dost thou interpose
Only to lay the sufferer asleep,
Where he who made him wretched troubles not
His rest—­thou dost strike down his tyrant too. 
Oh, there is joy when hands that held the scourge
Drop lifeless, and the pitiless heart is cold. 
Thou too dost purge from earth its horrible
And old idolatries;—­from the proud fanes
Each to his grave their priests go out, till none
Is left to teach their worship; then the fires
Of sacrifice are chilled, and the green moss
O’ercreeps their altars; the fallen images
Cumber the weedy courts, and for loud hymns,
Chanted by kneeling multitudes, the wind
Shrieks in the solitary aisles.  When he
Who gives his life to guilt, and laughs at all
The laws that God or man has made, and round
Hedges his seat with power, and shines in wealth,—­
Lifts up his atheist front to scoff at Heaven,
And celebrates his shame in open day,
Thou, in the pride of all his crimes, cutt’st off
The horrible example.  Touched by thine,
The extortioner’s hard hand foregoes the gold
Wrung from the o’er-worn poor.  The perjurer,