And filled the meanest worm that crawls in dust
With spirit, thought, and love; on Man alone,
Partial in causeless malice, wantonly
Heaped ruin, vice, and slavery; his soul
Blasted with withering curses; placed afar 100
The meteor-happiness, that shuns his grasp,
But serving on the frightful gulf to glare,
Rent wide beneath his footsteps? 
Nature!—­no! 
Kings, priests, and statesmen, blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts 105
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society.  The child,
Ere he can lisp his mother’s sacred name,
Swells with the unnatural pride of crime, and lifts
His baby-sword even in a hero’s mood. 110
This infant-arm becomes the bloodiest scourge
Of devastated earth; whilst specious names,
Learned in soft childhood’s unsuspecting hour,
Serve as the sophisms with which manhood dims
Bright Reason’s ray, and sanctifies the sword 115
Upraised to shed a brother’s innocent blood. 
Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man
Inherits vice and misery, when Force
And Falsehood hang even o’er the cradled babe
Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good. 120
’Ah! to the stranger-soul, when first it peeps
From its new tenement, and looks abroad
For happiness and sympathy, how stern
And desolate a tract is this wide world! 
How withered all the buds of natural good! 125
No shade, no shelter from the sweeping storms
Of pitiless power!  On its wretched frame,
Poisoned, perchance, by the disease and woe
Heaped on the wretched parent whence it sprung
By morals, law, and custom, the pure winds 130
Of Heaven, that renovate the insect tribes,
May breathe not.  The untainting light of day
May visit not its longings.  It is bound
Ere it has life:  yea, all the chains are forged
Long ere its being:  all liberty and love 135
And peace is torn from its defencelessness;
Cursed from its birth, even from its cradle doomed
To abjectness and bondage!

’Throughout this varied and eternal world
Soul is the only element:  the block 140
That for uncounted ages has remained
The moveless pillar of a mountain’s weight
Is active, living spirit.  Every grain
Is sentient both in unity and part,
And the minutest atom comprehends 145
A world of loves and hatreds; these beget
Evil and good:  hence truth and falsehood spring;
Hence will and thought and action, all the germs
Of pain or pleasure, sympathy or hate,
That variegate the eternal universe. 150
Soul is not more polluted than the beams
Of Heaven’s pure orb, ere round their rapid lines
The taint of earth-born atmospheres arise.