Our easy vicar cut the matter short;
He would not listen to such vile report. 
   All were not thus—­there govern’d in that year
A stern stout churl, an angry overseer;
A tyrant fond of power, loud, lewd, and most severe: 
Him the mild vicar, him the graver clerk,
Advised, reproved, but nothing would he mark. 
Save the disgrace; “and that, my friends,” said he,
“Will I avenge, whenever time may be.” 
And now, alas! ’twas time:  —­from man to man
Doubt and alarm and shrewd suspicions ran. 
   With angry spirit and with sly intent,
This parish-ruler to the altar went: 
A private mark he fix’d on shillings three,
And but one mark could in the money see: 
Besides in peering round, he chanced to note
A sprinkling slight on Jachin’s Sunday-coat: 
All doubt was over:  —­when the flock were bless’d,
In wrath he rose, and thus his mind express’d:  —
   “Foul deeds are here!” and saying this, he took
The Clerk, whose conscience, in her cold-fit, shook: 
His pocket then was emptied on the place;
All saw his guilt; all witness’d his disgrace: 
He fell, he fainted, not a groan, a look,
Escaped the culprit; ’twas a final stroke —
A death-wound never to be heal’d—­a fall
That all had witness’d, and amazed were all. 
   As he recover’d, to his mind it came,
“I owe to Satan this disgrace and shame:” 
All the seduction now appear’d in view;
“Let me withdraw,” he said, and he withdrew: 
No one withheld him, all in union cried,
E’en the avenger,—­“We are satisfied:” 
For what has death in any form to give,
Equal to that man’s terrors, if he live? 
   He lived in freedom, but he hourly saw
How much more fatal justice is than law;
He saw another in his office reign,
And his mild master treat him with disdain: 
He saw that all men shunn’d him, some reviled,
The harsh pass’d frowning, and the simple smiled;
The town maintain’d him, but with some reproof,
And clerks and scholars proudly kept aloof. 
In each lone place, dejected and dismay’d,
Shrinking from view, his wasting form he laid;
Or to the restless sea and roaring wind
Gave the strong yearnings of a ruin’d mind: 
On the broad beach, the silent summer-day,
Stretch’d on some wreck, he wore his life away;
Or where the river mingles with the sea,
Or on the mud-bank by the elder tree,
Or by the bounding marsh-dike, there was he: 
And when unable to forsake the town,
In the blind courts he sat desponding down —
Always alone:  then feebly would he crawl
The church-way walk, and lean upon the wall: 
Too ill for this, he lay beside the door,
Compell’d to hear the reasoning of the poor: 
He look’d so pale, so weak, the pitying crowd
Their firm belief of his repentance vow’d;
They saw him then so ghastly and so thin,
That they exclaim’d, “Is this the work of sin?”
   “Yes,” in his better