Queen Mab Read Online

– ›I go,‹ He cried,

›But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth

Eternally.‹ –– The dampness of the grave

Bathed my imperishable front. I fell,

And long lay tranced upon the charmed soil.

When I awoke Hell burned within my brain,

Which staggered on its seat; for all around

The mouldering relics of my kindred lay,

Even as the Almighty's ire arrested them,

And in their various attitudes of death

My murdered children's mute and eyeless skulls

Glared ghastily upon me.

But my soul,

From sight and sense of the polluting woe

Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer

Hell's freedom to the servitude of Heaven.

Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began

My lonely and unending pilgrimage,

Resolved to wage unweariable war

With my almighty Tyrant, and to hurl

Defiance at His impotence to harm

Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand

That barred my passage to the peaceful grave

Has crushed the earth to misery, and given

Its empire to the chosen of His slaves.

These have I seen, even from the earliest dawn

Of weak, unstable and precarious power,

Then preaching peace, as now they practise war;

So, when they turned but from the massacre

Of unoffending infidels, to quench

Their thirst for ruin in the very blood

That flowed in their own veins, and pitiless zeal

Froze every human feeling, as the wife

Sheathed in her husband's heart the sacred steel,

Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love;

And friends to friends, brothers to brothers stood

Opposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war,

Scarce satiable by fate's last death-draught, waged,

Drunk from the winepress of the Almighty's wrath;

Whilst the red cross, in mockery of peace,

Pointed to victory! When the fray was done,

No remnant of the exterminated faith

Survived to tell its ruin, but the flesh,

With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere,

That rotted on the half-extinguished pile.

Yes! I have seen God's worshippers unsheathe

The sword of His revenge, when grace descended,

Confirming all unnatural impulses,

To sanctify their desolating deeds;

And frantic priests waved the ill-omened cross

O'er the unhappy earth: then shone the sun

On showers of gore from the upflashing steel

Of safe assassination, and all crime

Made stingless by the Spirits of the Lord,

And blood-red rainbows canopied the land.

Spirit, no year of my eventful being

Has passed unstained by crime and misery,

Which flows from God's own faith.

I've marked His slaves

With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile

The insensate mob, and, whilst one hand was red

With murder, feign to stretch the other out

For brotherhood and peace; and that they now

Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds

Are marked with all the narrowness and crime

That Freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise,

Reason may claim our gratitude, who now

Establishing the imperishable throne

Of truth, and stubborn virtue, maketh vain

The unprevailing malice of my Foe,

Whose bootless rage heaps torments for the brave,

Adds impotent eternities to pain,

Whilst keenest disappointment racks His breast

To see the smiles of peace around them play,

To frustrate or to sanctify their doom.

Thus have I stood, – through a wild waste of years

Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,

Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined,

Mocking my powerless Tyrant's horrible curse

With stubborn and unalterable will,

Even as a giant oak, which Heaven's fierce flame

Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand

A monument of fadeless ruin there;

Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves

The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,

As in the sunlight's calm it spreads

Its worn and withered arms on high

To meet the quiet of a summer's noon.«

The Fairy waved her wand:

Ahasuerus fled

Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist,

That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove,

Flee from the morning beam:

The matter of which dreams are made

Not more endowed with actual life

Than this phantasmal portraiture

Of wandering human thought.

VIII

The Fairy.

»The Present and the Past thou hast beheld:

It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn

The secrets of the Future. – Time!

Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom,

Render thou up thy half-devoured babes,

And from the cradles of eternity,

Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep

By the deep murmuring stream of passing things,

Tear thou that gloomy shroud. – Spirit, behold

Thy glorious destiny!«

Joy to the Spirit came.

Through the wide rent in Time's eternal veil,

Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear:

Earth was no longer Hell;

Love, freedom, health, had given

Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime,

And all its pulses beat

Symphonious to the planetary spheres:

Then dulcet music swelled

Concordant with the life-strings of the soul;

It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there,

Catching new life from transitory death, –

Like the vague sighings of a wind at even,

That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea

And dies on the creation of its breath,

And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits:

Was the pure stream of feeling

That sprung from these sweet notes,

And o'er the Spirit's human sympathies

With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed.

Joy to the Spirit came, –

Such joy as when a lover sees

The chosen of his soul in happiness,

And witnesses her peace

Whose woe to him were bitterer than death,

Sees her unfaded cheek

Glow mantling in first luxury of health,

Thrills with her lovely eyes,

Which like two stars amid the heaving main

Sparkle through liquid bliss.

Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen:

»I will not call the ghost of ages gone

To unfold the frightful secrets of its lore;

The present now is past,

And those events that desolate the earth

Have faded from the memory of Time,

Who dares not give reality to that

Whose being I annul. To me is given

The wonders of the human world to keep,

Space, matter, time, and mind. Futurity

Exposes now its treasure; let the sight

Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope.

O human Spirit! spur thee to the goal

Where virtue fixes universal peace,

And midst the ebb and flow of human things,

Show somewhat stable, somewhat certain still,

A lighthouse o'er the wild of dreary waves.

The habitable earth is full of bliss;

Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled

By everlasting snowstorms round the poles,

Where matter dared not vegetate or live,

But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude

Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;

And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles

Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls

Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,

Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet

To murmur through the Heaven-breathing groves

And melodize with man's blest nature there.

Those deserts of immeasurable sand,

Whose age-collected fervours scarce allowed

A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring,

Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard's love

Broke on the sultry silentness alone,

Now teem with countless rills and shady woods,

Cornfields and pastures and white cottages;

And where the startled wilderness beheld

A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,

A tigress sating with the flesh of lambs

The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs,

Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang,

Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,

Offering sweet incense to the sunrise, smiles

To see a babe before his mother's door,

Sharing his morning's meal

With the green and golden basilisk

That comes to lick his feet.

Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail

Has seen above the illimitable plain,

Morning on night, and night on morning rise,

Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread

Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea,

Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves

So long have mingled with the gusty wind

In melancholy loneliness, and swept

The desert of those ocean solitudes,

But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek,

The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm,

Now to the sweet and many-mingling sounds

Of kindliest human impulses respond.

Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem,

With lightsome clouds and shining seas between,

And fertile valleys, resonant with bliss,

Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave,

Which like a toil-worn labourer leaps to shore,

To meet the kisses of the flow'rets there.

All things are recreated, and the flame

Of consentaneous love inspires all life:

The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck

To myriads, who still grow beneath her care,

Rewarding her with their pure perfectness:

The balmy breathings of the wind inhale

Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad:

Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere,

Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream:

No storms deform the beaming brow of Heaven,

Nor scatter in the freshness of its pride

The foliage of the ever-verdant trees;

But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair,

And Autumn proudly bears her matron grace,

Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of Spring,

Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit

Reflects its tint, and blushes into love.

The lion now forgets to thirst for blood:

There might you see him sporting in the sun

Beside the dreadless kid; his claws are sheathed,

His teeth are harmless, custom's force has made

His nature as the nature of a lamb.

Like passion's fruit, the nightshade's tempting bane

Poisons no more the pleasure it bestows:

All bitterness is past; the cup of joy

Unmingled mantles to the goblet's brim,

And courts the thirsty lips it fled before.

But chief, ambiguous Man, he that can know

More misery, and dream more joy than all;

Whose keen sensations thrill within his breast

To mingle with a loftier instinct there,

Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,

Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each;

Who stands amid the ever-varying world,

The burthen or the glory of the earth;

He chief perceives the change, his being notes

The gradual renovation, and defines

Each movement of its progress on his mind.

Man, where the gloom of the long polar night

Lowers o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil,

Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost

Basks in the moonlight's ineffectual glow,

Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night;

His chilled and narrow energies, his heart,

Insensible to courage, truth, or love,

His stunted stature and imbecile frame,

Marked him for some abortion of the earth,

Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around,

Whose habits and enjoyments were his own:

His life a feverish dream of stagnant woe,

Whose meagre wants, but scantily fulfilled,

Apprised him ever of the joyless length

Which his short being's wretchedness had reached;

His death a pang which famine, cold and toil

Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital spark

Clung to the body stubbornly, had brought:

All was inflicted here that Earth's revenge

Could wreak on the infringers of her law;

One curse alone was spared – the name of God.

Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day

With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame,

Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere

Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed

Unnatural vegetation, where the land

Teemed with all earthquake, tempest and disease,

Was Man a nobler being; slavery

Had crushed him to his country's bloodstained dust;

Or he was bartered for the fame of power,

Which all internal impulses destroying,

Makes human will an article of trade;

Or he was changed with Christians for their gold,

And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound

Of the flesh-mangling scourge, he does the work

Of all-polluting luxury and wealth,

Which doubly visits on the tyrants' heads

The long-protracted fulness of their woe;

Or he was led to legal butchery,

To turn to worms beneath that burning sun,

Where kings first leagued against the rights of men,

And priests first traded with the name of God.

Even where the milder zone afforded Man

A seeming shelter, yet contagion there,

Blighting his being with unnumbered ills,

Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth till late

Availed to arrest its progress, or create

That peace which first in bloodless victory waved

Her snowy standard o'er this favoured clime:

There man was long the train-bearer of slaves,

The mimic of surrounding misery,

The jackal of ambition's lion-rage,

The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal.

Here now the human being stands adorning

This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind;

Blessed from his birth with all bland impulses,

Which gently in his noble bosom wake

All kindly passions and all pure desires.

Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing

Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal

Dawns on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise

In time-destroying infiniteness, gift

With self-enshrined eternity,A16 that mocks

The unprevailing hoariness of age,

And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene

Swift as an unremembered vision, stands

Immortal upon earth: no longer now

He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,A17

And horribly devours his mangled flesh,

Which, still avenging Nature's broken law,

Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,

All evil passions, and all vain belief,

Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,

The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.

No longer now the winged habitants,

That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,

Flee from the form of man; but gather round,

And prune their sunny feathers on the hands

Which little children stretch in friendly sport

Towards these dreadless partners of their play.

All things are void of terror: Man has lost

His terrible prerogative, and stands

An equal amidst equals: happiness

And science dawn though late upon the earth;

Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;

Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,

Reason and passion cease to combat there;

Whilst each unfettered o'er the earth extend

Their all-subduing energies, and wield

The sceptre of a vast dominion there;

Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends

Its force to the omnipotence of mind,

Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truth

To decorate its Paradise of peace.«

IX

»O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!

To which those restless souls that ceaselessly

Throng through the human universe, aspire;

Thou consummation of all mortal hope!

Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will!

Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time,

Verge to one point and blend for ever there:

Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place!

Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,

Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come:

O happy Earth, reality of Heaven!

Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams,

And dim forebodings of thy loveliness

Haunting the human heart, have there entwined

Those rooted hopes of some sweet place of bliss

Where friends and lovers meet to part no more.

Thou art the end of all desire and will,

The product of all action; and the souls

That by the paths of an aspiring change

Have reached thy haven of perpetual peace,

There rest from the eternity of toil

That framed the fabric of thy perfectness.

Even Time, the conqueror, fled thee in his fear;

That hoary giant, who, in lonely pride,

So long had ruled the world, that nations fell

Beneath his silent footstep. Pyramids,

That for millenniums had withstood the tide

Of human things, his storm-breath drove in sand

Across that desert where their stones survived

The name of him whose pride had heaped them there.

Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp,

Was but the mushroom of a summer day,

That his light-winged footstep pressed to dust:

Time was the king of earth: all things gave way

Before him, but the fixed and virtuous will,

The sacred sympathies of soul and sense,

That mocked his fury and prepared his fall.

Yet slow and gradual dawned the morn of love;

Long lay the clouds of darkness o'er the scene,

Till from its native Heaven they rolled away:

First, Crime triumphant o'er all hope careered

Unblushing, undisguising, bold and strong;

Whilst Falsehood, tricked in Virtue's attributes,

Long sanctified all deeds of vice and woe,

Till done by her own venomous sting to death,

She left the moral world without a law,

No longer fettering Passion's fearless wing,

Nor searing Reason with the brand of God.

Then steadily the happy ferment worked;

Reason was free; and wild though Passion went

Through tangled glens and wood-embosomed meads,

Gathering a garland of the strangest flowers,

Yet like the bee returning to her queen,

She bound the sweetest on her sister's brow,

Who meek and sober kissed the sportive child,

No longer trembling at the broken rod.

Mild was the slow necessity of death:

The tranquil spirit failed beneath its grasp,

Without a groan, almost without a fear,

Calm as a voyager to some distant land,

And full of wonder, full of hope as he.

The deadly germs of languor and disease

Died in the human frame, and Purity

Blessed with all gifts her earthly worshippers.

How vigorous then the athletic form of age!

How clear its open and unwrinkled brow!

Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, nor care,

Had stamped the seal of gray deformity

On all the mingling lineaments of time.

How lovely the intrepid front of youth!

Which meek-eyed courage decked with freshest grace;

Courage of soul, that dreaded not a name,

And elevated will, that journeyed on

Through life's phantasmal scene in fearlessness,

With virtue, love, and pleasure, hand in hand.

Then, that sweet bondage which is Freedom's self,

And rivets with sensation's softest tie

The kindred sympathies of human souls,

Needed no fetters of tyrannic law:

Those delicate and timid impulses

In Nature's primal modesty arose,

And with undoubted confidence disclosed

The growing longings of its dawning love,

Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,

That virtue of the cheaply virtuous,

Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost.

No longer prostitution's venomed bane

Poisoned the springs of happiness and life;

Woman and man, in confidence and love,

Equal and free and pure together trod

The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more

Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim's feet.

Then, where, through distant ages, long in pride

The palace of the monarch-slave had mocked

Famine's faint groan, and Penury's silent tear,

A heap of crumbling ruins stood, and threw

Year after year their stones upon the field,

Wakening a lonely echo; and the leaves

Of the old thorn, that on the topmost tower

Usurped the royal ensign's grandeur, shook

In the stern storm that swayed the topmost tower

And whispered strange tales in the Whirlwind's ear.

Low through the lone cathedral's roofless aisles

The melancholy winds a death-dirge sung:

It were a sight of awfulness to see

The works of faith and slavery, so vast,

So sumptuous, yet so perishing withal!

Even as the corpse that rests beneath its wall.

A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death

To-day, the breathing marble glows above

To decorate its memory, and tongues

Are busy of its life: to-morrow, worms

In silence and in darkness seize their prey.

Within the massy prison's mouldering courts,

Fearless and free the ruddy children played,

Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows

With the green ivy and the red wallflower,

That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom;

The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron,

There rusted amid heaps of broken stone

That mingled slowly with their native earth:

There the broad beam of day, which feebly once

Lighted the cheek of lean Captivity

With a pale and sickly glare, then freely shone

On the pure smiles of infant playfulness:

No more the shuddering voice of hoarse Despair

Pealed through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes

Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds

And merriment were resonant around.

These ruins soon left not a wreck behind:

Their elements, wide scattered o'er the globe,

To happier shapes were moulded, and became

Ministrant to all blissful impulses:

Thus human things were perfected, and earth,

Even as a child beneath its mother's love,

Was strengthened in all excellence, and grew

Fairer and nobler with each passing year.

Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the scene

Closes in steadfast darkness, and the past

Fades from our charmed sight. My task is done:

Thy lore is learned. Earth's wonders are thine own,

With all the fear and all the hope they bring.

My spells are passed: the present now recurs.

Ah me! a pathless wilderness remains

Yet unsubdued by man's reclaiming hand.

Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course,

Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue

The gradual paths of an aspiring change:

For birth and life and death, and that strange state

Before the naked soul has found its home,

All tend to perfect happiness, and urge

The restless wheels of being on their way,

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:

For birth but wakes the spirit to the sense

Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape

New modes of passion to its frame may lend;

Life is its state of action, and the store

Of all events is aggregated there

That variegate the eternal universe;

Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom,

That leads to azure isles and beaming skies

And happy regions of eternal hope.

Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on:

Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk,

Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom,

Yet Spring's awakening breath will woo the earth,

To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower,

That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens,

Lighting the greenwood with its sunny smile.

Fear not then, Spirit, Death's disrobing hand,

So welcome when the tyrant is awake,

So welcome when the bigot's hell-torch burns;

'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour,

The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep.

Death is no foe to Virtue: earth has seen

Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom,

Mingling with Freedom's fadeless laurels there,

And presaging the truth of visioned bliss.

Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene

Of linked and gradual being has confirmed?

Whose stingings bade thy heart look further still,

When, to the moonlight walk by Henry led,

Sweetly and sadly thou didst talk of death?

And wilt thou rudely tear them from thy breast,

Listening supinely to a bigot's creed,

Or tamely crouching to the tyrant's rod,

Whose iron thongs are red with human gore?

Never: but bravely bearing on, thy will

Is destined an eternal war to wage

With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot

The germs of misery from the human heart.

Thine is the hand whose piety would soothe

The thorny pillow of unhappy crime,

Whose impotence an easy pardon gains,

Watching its wanderings as a friend's disease:

Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy

Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will,

When fenced by power and master of the world.

Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind,

Free from heart-withering custom's cold control,

Of passion lofty, pure and unsubdued.

Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee,

And therefore art thou worthy of the boon

Which thou hast now received: Virtue shall keep

Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod,

And many days of beaming hope shall bless

Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love.

Go, happy one, and give that bosom joy

Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch

Light, life and rapture from thy smile.«

The Fairy waves her wand of charm.

Speechless with bliss the Spirit mounts the car,

That rolled beside the battlement,

Bending her beamy eyes in thankfulness.

Again the enchanted steeds were yoked,

Again the burning wheels inflame

The steep descent of Heaven's untrodden way.

Fast and far the chariot flew:

The vast and fiery globes that rolled

Around the Fairy's palace-gate

Lessened by slow degrees and soon appeared

Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbs

That there attendant on the solar power

With borrowed light pursued their narrower way.

Earth floated then below:

The chariot paused a moment there;

The Spirit then descended:

The restless coursers pawed the ungenial soil,

Snuffed the gross air, and then, their errand done,

Unfurled their pinions to the winds of Heaven.

The Body and the Soul united then,

A gentle start convulsed lanthe's frame:

Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed;

Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained:

She looked around in wonder and beheld

Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch,

Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love,

And the bright beaming stars

That through the casement shone.

Notes on Queen Mab

Shelley's Notes

A1 The sun's unclouded orb

Rolled through the black concave.

Beyond our atmosphere the sun would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black concave. The equal diffusion of its light on earth is owing to the refraction of the rays by the atmosphere, and their reflection from other bodies. Light consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body. Its velocity greatly exceeds that of any substance with which we are acquainted: observations on the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites have demonstrated that light takes up no more than 8' 7'' in passing from the sun to the earth, a distance of 95,000,000 miles. – Some idea may be gained of the immense distance of the fixed stars when it is computed that many years would elapse before light could reach this earth from the nearest of them; yet in one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun from the earth.

A2 Whilst round the chariot's way

Innumerable systems rolled.

The plurality of worlds, – the indefinite immensity of the universe, is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is angered at the consequences of that necessity, which is a synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.

The nearest of the fixed stars is inconceivably distant from the earth, and they are probably proportionably distant from each other. By a calculation of the velocity of light, Sirius is supposed to be at least 54,224,000,000,000 miles from the earthB1. That which appears only like a thin and silvery cloud streaking the heaven is in effect composed of innumerable clusters of suns, each shining with its own light, and illuminating numbers of planets that revolve around them. Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable necessity.

A3 These are the hired bravos who defend

The tyrant's throne.

To employ murder as a means of justice is an idea which a man of an enlightened mind will not dwell upon with pleasure. To march forth in rank and file, and all the pomp of streamers and trumpets, for the purpose of shooting at our fellow-men as a mark; to inflict upon them all the variety of wound and anguish; to leave them weltering in their blood; to wander over the field of desolation, and count the number of the dying and the dead, – are employments which in thesis we may maintain to be necessary, but which no good man will contemplate with gratulation and delight. A battle we suppose is won: – thus truth is established, thus the cause of justice is confirmed! It surely requires no common sagacity to discern the connection between this immense heap of calamities and the assertion of truth or the maintenance of justice.

»Kings, and ministers of state, the real authors of the calamity, sit unmolested in their cabinet, while those against whom the fury of the storm is directed are, for the most part, persons who have been trepanned into the service, or who are dragged unwillingly from their peaceful homes into the field of battle. A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men's iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural being.

To these more serious and momentous considerations it may be proper to add a recollection of the ridiculousness of the military character. Its first constituent is obedience: a soldier is, of all descriptions of men, the most completely a machine; yet his profession inevitably teaches him something of dogmatism, swaggering, and self-consequence: he is like the puppet of a showman, who, at the very time he is made to strut and swell and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know cannot assume the most insignificant gesture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is moved by his exhibitor.« – Godwin's Enquirer, Essay V.

I will here subjoin a little poem, so strongly expressive of my abhorrence of despotism and falsehood, that I fear lest it never again may be depictured so vividly. This opportunity is perhaps the only one that ever will occur of rescuing it from oblivion.

Falsehood and Vice

A Dialogue

Whilst monarchs laughed upon their thrones

To hear a famished nation's groans,

And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe

That makes its eyes and veins o'er-flow, –

Those thrones, high built upon the heaps

Of bones where frenzied Famine sleeps,

Where Slavery wields her scourge of iron,

Red with mankind's unheeded gore,

And War's mad fiends the scene environ,

Mingling with shrieks a drunken roar,

There Vice and Falsehood took their stand,

High raised above the unhappy land.

Falsehood.

Brother! arise from the dainty fare,

Which thousands have toiled and bled to bestow;

A finer feast for thy hungry ear

Is the news that I bring of human woe.

Vice.

And, secret one, what hast thou done,

To compare, in thy tumid pride, with me?

I, whose career, through the blasted year,

Has been tracked by despair and agony.

Falsehood.

What have I done! –– I have torn the robe

From baby Truth's unsheltered form,

And round the desolated globe

Borne safely the bewildering charm:

My tyrant-slaves to a dungeon-floor

Have bound the fearless innocent,

And streams of fertilizing gore

Flow from her bosom's hideous rent,

Which this unfailing dagger gave . ...

I dread that blood! – no more – this day

Is ours, though her eternal ray

Must shine upon our grave.

Yet know, proud Vice, had I not given

To thee the robe I stole from Heaven,

Thy shape of ugliness and fear

Had never gained admission here.

Vice.

And know, that had I disdained to toil,

But sate in my loathsome cave the while,

And ne'er to these hateful sons of Heaven,

GOLD, MONARCHY, and MURDER, given;

Hadst thou with all thine art essayed

One of thy games then to have played,

With all thine overweening boast,

Falsehood! I tell thee thou hadst lost! –

Yet wherefore this dispute? – we tend,

Fraternal, to one common end;

In this cold grave beneath my feet,

Will our hopes, our fears, and our labours, meet.

Falsehood.

I brought my daughter, RELIGION, on earth:

She smothered Reason's babes in their birth;

But dreaded their mother's eye severe, –

So the crocodile slunk off slily in fear,

And loosed her bloodhounds from the den .