110
The frightful waves are driven,—­when his son
Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion
Drives his wife raving mad.  But the poor man,
Whose life is misery, and fear, and care;
Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil; 115
Who ever hears his famished offspring’s scream,
Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gaze
For ever meets, and the proud rich man’s eye
Flashing command, and the heart-breaking scene
Of thousands like himself;—­he little heeds 120
The rhetoric of tyranny; his hate
Is quenchless as his wrongs; he laughs to scorn
The vain and bitter mockery of words,
Feeling the horror of the tyrant’s deeds,
And unrestrained but by the arm of power, 125
That knows and dreads his enmity.

’The iron rod of Penury still compels
Her wretched slave to bow the knee to wealth,
And poison, with unprofitable toil,
A life too void of solace to confirm 130
The very chains that bind him to his doom. 
Nature, impartial in munificence,
Has gifted man with all-subduing will. 
Matter, with all its transitory shapes,
Lies subjected and plastic at his feet, 135
That, weak from bondage, tremble as they tread. 
How many a rustic Milton has passed by,
Stifling the speechless longings of his heart,
In unremitting drudgery and care! 
How many a vulgar Cato has compelled 140
His energies, no longer tameless then,
To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail! 
How many a Newton, to whose passive ken
Those mighty spheres that gem infinity
Were only specks of tinsel, fixed in Heaven 145
To light the midnights of his native town!

’Yet every heart contains perfection’s germ: 
The wisest of the sages of the earth,
That ever from the stores of reason drew
Science and truth, and virtue’s dreadless tone, 150
Were but a weak and inexperienced boy,
Proud, sensual, unimpassioned, unimbued
With pure desire and universal love,
Compared to that high being, of cloudless brain,
Untainted passion, elevated will, 155
Which Death (who even would linger long in awe
Within his noble presence, and beneath
His changeless eyebeam) might alone subdue. 
Him, every slave now dragging through the filth
Of some corrupted city his sad life, 160
Pining with famine, swoln with luxury,
Blunting the keenness of his spiritual sense
With narrow schemings and unworthy cares,
Or madly rushing through all violent crime,
To move the deep stagnation of his soul,—­ 165
Might imitate and equal. 
But mean lust
Has bound its chains so tight around the earth,