— To challenge heaven.

— Not less The lower deeps.  It laughs at Happiness!  That know I, though the echoes of it wail, For one step upward on the crags you scale.  Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust, Which means our soul asleep or body’s lust, Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat A temperate common music, sunlike heat The happiness not predatory sheds!

— But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads, Now rages to outdo a horny Past.  Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast Are thrown by every novel light upraised.  The world’s whole round smokes ominously, amazed And trembling as its pregnant AEtna swells.  Combustibles on hot combustibles Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire The mountain-torrent of infernal ire And leave the track of devils where men built.  Perceptive of a doom, the sinner’s guilt Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud, If drops the chillness of a passing cloud, To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:  None save they but the souls which them contain.  No extramural God, the God within Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.  A world that for the spur of fool and knave, Sweats in its laboratory, what shall save?  But men who ply their wits in such a school, Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.

— Much have I studied hard Necessity!  To know her Wisdom’s mother, and that we May deem the harshness of her later cries In labour a sure goad to prick the wise, If men among the warnings which convulse, Can gravely dread without the craven’s pulse.  Long ere the rising of this Age of ours, The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.  Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring, And are as lasting as the parent thing.  Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill, They might o’ermatch and have mankind at will.

     Behold such army gathering:  ours the spur,
     No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer. 
     Not fool or knave is now the enemy
     O’ershadowing men, ’tis Folly, Knavery! 
     A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach. 
     Now must the brother soul alive in each,
     His traitorous individual devildom
     Hold subject lest the grand destruction come. 
     Dimly men see it menacing apace
     To overthrow, perchance uproot the race. 
     Within, without, they are a field of tares: 
     Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,
     And wherefore warrior service they must yield,
     Shines visible as life on either field. 
     That is my comfort, following shock on shock,
     Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock. 
     Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,
     Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,
     Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,
     The human and Satanic intellect,
     Determined for their uses to control
     What forces on the earth and under roll,
     Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand
     Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land. 
     They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are: 
     Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.