KING: 
’No cessation! 
Oh! must this last for ever?  Awful Death, 65
I wish, yet fear to clasp thee!—­Not one moment
Of dreamless sleep!  O dear and blessed peace! 
Why dost thou shroud thy vestal purity
In penury and dungeons? wherefore lurkest
With danger, death, and solitude; yet shunn’st 70
The palace I have built thee?  Sacred peace! 
Oh visit me but once, but pitying shed
One drop of balm upon my withered soul.’

THE FAIRY: 
’Vain man! that palace is the virtuous heart,
And Peace defileth not her snowy robes 75
In such a shed as thine.  Hark! yet he mutters;
His slumbers are but varied agonies,
They prey like scorpions on the springs of life. 
There needeth not the hell that bigots frame
To punish those who err:  earth in itself 80
Contains at once the evil and the cure;
And all-sufficing Nature can chastise
Those who transgress her law,—­she only knows
How justly to proportion to the fault
The punishment it merits. 
Is it strange 85
That this poor wretch should pride him in his woe? 
Take pleasure in his abjectness, and hug
The scorpion that consumes him?  Is it strange
That, placed on a conspicuous throne of thorns,
Grasping an iron sceptre, and immured 90
Within a splendid prison, whose stern bounds
Shut him from all that’s good or dear on earth,
His soul asserts not its humanity? 
That man’s mild nature rises not in war
Against a king’s employ?  No—­’tis not strange. 95
He, like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts and lives
Just as his father did; the unconquered powers
Of precedent and custom interpose
Between a KING and virtue.  Stranger yet,
To those who know not Nature, nor deduce 100
The future from the present, it may seem,
That not one slave, who suffers from the crimes
Of this unnatural being; not one wretch,
Whose children famish, and whose nuptial bed
Is earth’s unpitying bosom, rears an arm
To dash him from his throne! 105
Those gilded flies
That, basking in the sunshine of a court,
Fatten on its corruption!—­what are they? 
—­The drones of the community; they feed
On the mechanic’s labour:  the starved hind 110
For them compels the stubborn glebe to yield
Its unshared harvests; and yon squalid form,
Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastes
A sunless life in the unwholesome mine,
Drags out in labour a protracted death, 115
To glut their grandeur; many faint with toil,
That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.