Heading the monstrous catalogue of crime,
     I found fore-written in his horoscope;
     As great a monster in man’s history
     As was in nature his nativity;
     So savage, bloody, terrible, and impious,
     Who, should he live, would tear his country’s entrails,
     As by his birth his mother’s; with which crime
     Beginning, he should clench the dreadful tale
     By trampling on his father’s silver head. 
     All which fore-reading, and his act of birth
     Fate’s warrant that I read his life aright;
     To save his country from his mother’s fate,
     I gave abroad that he had died with her
     His being slew; with midnight secrecy
     I had him carried to a lonely tower
     Hewn from the mountain-barriers of the realm,
     And under strict anathema of death
     Guarded from men’s inquisitive approach,
     Save from the trusty few one needs must trust;
     Who while his fasten’d body they provide
     With salutary garb and nourishment,
     Instruct his soul in what no soul may miss
     Of holy faith, and in such other lore
     As may solace his life-imprisonment,
     And tame perhaps the Savage prophesied
     Toward such a trial as I aim at now,
     And now demand your special hearing to. 
     What in this fearful business I have done,
     Judge whether lightly or maliciously,—­
     I, with my own and only flesh and blood,
     And proper lineal inheritor! 
     I swear, had his foretold atrocities
     Touch’d me alone.  I had not saved myself
     At such a cost to him; but as a king,—­
     A Christian king,—­I say, advisedly,
     Who would devote his people to a tyrant
     Worse than Caligula fore-chronicled? 
     But even this not without grave mis-giving,
     Lest by some chance mis-reading of the stars,
     Or mis-direction of what rightly read,
     I wrong my son of his prerogative,
     And Poland of her rightful sovereign. 
     For, sure and certain prophets as the stars,
     Although they err not, he who reads them may;
     Or rightly reading—­seeing there is One
     Who governs them, as, under Him, they us,
     We are not sure if the rough diagram
     They draw in heaven and we interpret here,
     Be sure of operation, if the Will
     Supreme, that sometimes for some special end
     The course of providential nature breaks
     By miracle, may not of these same stars
     Cancel his own first draft, or overrule
     What else fore-written all else overrules. 
     As, for example, should the Will Almighty
     Permit the Free-will of particular man
     To break the meshes of else strangling fate—­
     Which Free-will, fearful of foretold abuse,
     I have myself from my own son fore-closed
     From ever possible self-extrication;
     A terrible responsibility,