’Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,
Without a hope, a passion, or a love,
Who, through a life of luxury and lies, 205
Have crept by flattery to the seats of power,
Support the system whence their honours flow... 
They have three words:—­well tyrants know their use,
Well pay them for the loan, with usury
Torn from a bleeding world!—­God, Hell, and Heaven. 210
A vengeful, pitiless, and almighty fiend,
Whose mercy is a nickname for the rage
Of tameless tigers hungering for blood. 
Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire,
Where poisonous and undying worms prolong 215
Eternal misery to those hapless slaves
Whose life has been a penance for its crimes. 
And Heaven, a meed for those who dare belie
Their human nature, quake, believe, and cringe
Before the mockeries of earthly power. 220

’These tools the tyrant tempers to his work,
Wields in his wrath, and as he wills destroys,
Omnipotent in wickedness:  the while
Youth springs, age moulders, manhood tamely does
His bidding, bribed by short-lived joys to lend 225
Force to the weakness of his trembling arm.

’They rise, they fall; one generation comes
Yielding its harvest to destruction’s scythe. 
It fades, another blossoms:  yet behold! 
Red glows the tyrant’s stamp-mark on its bloom, 230
Withering and cankering deep its passive prime. 
He has invented lying words and modes,
Empty and vain as his own coreless heart;
Evasive meanings, nothings of much sound,
To lure the heedless victim to the toils 235
Spread round the valley of its paradise.

’Look to thyself, priest, conqueror, or prince! 
Whether thy trade is falsehood, and thy lusts
Deep wallow in the earnings of the poor,
With whom thy Master was:—­or thou delight’st 240
In numbering o’er the myriads of thy slain,
All misery weighing nothing in the scale
Against thy short-lived fame:  or thou dost load
With cowardice and crime the groaning land,
A pomp-fed king.  Look to thy wretched self! 245
Ay, art thou not the veriest slave that e’er
Crawled on the loathing earth?  Are not thy days
Days of unsatisfying listlessness? 
Dost thou not cry, ere night’s long rack is o’er,
“When will the morning come?” Is not thy youth 250
A vain and feverish dream of sensualism? 
Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease? 
Are not thy views of unregretted death
Drear, comfortless, and horrible?  Thy mind,
Is it not morbid as thy nerveless frame, 255
Incapable of judgement, hope, or love? 
And dost thou wish the errors to survive