In thy proud eye, imperial Arbiter,
An insect small to prize appeareth man;
His pomp and honours have o'er thee no spell,
To win thy purpose from the little span
Allotted unto life in Nature's plan;
Trifles to him thy favour can engage;
High he looks up, and soon his race is run;
While the small daisy upon Nature's page,
On which he sets his foot, gains endless heritage.
Look at the farces played in every age
By puny empires, vaunting vain display,
And blush to read the historian's fulsome page,
Where kings are worshipped like to gods in clay.
Their pride the earth disdained and swept away,
By thee, a shadow, worsted of their all—
Legions of soldiers, battle's dread array—
Kings' speeches—golden bribes—nought saved their fall;
All 'neath thy feet are laid, thy robe their funeral pall.
How feeble and how vain, compared to thine,
The glittering pageantry of earthly kings,
Though in their little light they would outshine
Thy splendid sun: yet soon thy vengeance flings
Its gloom around their crowns, poor puny things.
What then remains of all that great hath been?
A tattered state, that as a mockery clings
To greatness, and concludes the idle scene—
In life how mighty thought, and found in death how mean.
Thus Athens lingers on, a nest of slaves,
And Babylon's an almost doubted name:
Thou with thy finger writ'st upon their graves,
On one obscurity, the other shame.
The richest greatness or the proudest fame
Thy sport concludeth as a farce at last:
They were and would be, but are not the same:
Tyrants, that made all subject where they passed,
Become a common jest for laughter at the last.
Here where I stand thy voice breathes from the ground
A buried tale of sixteen hundred years,
And many a Roman fragment, littered round,
In each new-rooted mole-hill reappears.
Ah! what is fame, that honour so reveres?
And what is Victory's laurel-crowned event
When thy unmasked intolerance interferes?
A Caesar's deeds are left to banishment,
Indebted e'en to moles to show us where he went.
A mighty poet them, and every line
Thy grand conception traces is sublime:
No language doth thy god-like works confine;
Thy voice is earth's grand polyglot, O Time!
Known of all tongues, and read in every clime,
Changes of language make no change in thee:
Thy works have worsted centuries of their prime,
Yet new editions every day we see—
Ruin thy moral theme, its end eternity.
A satirist, too, thy pen is deadly keen;
Thou turnest things that once did wonder claim
To jests ridiculous and memories mean;—
The Egyptian pyramids, without a name,
Stand monuments to chaos, not to fame—
Stone jests of kings which thou in sport did'st save,
As towering satires of pride's living shame—
Beacons to prove thy overbearing wave
Will make all fame at last become its owner's grave.
Mighty survivors! Thou shalt see the hour
When all the grandeur that the earth contains—
Its pomp, its splendour, and its hollow power—
Shall waste like water from its weakened veins,
And not a shadow or a myth remain—
When names and fames of which the earth is full,
And books, with all their knowledge urged in vain—
When dead and living shall be void and null,
And Nature's pillow be at last a human skull.
E'en temples raised to worship and to prayer,
Sacred from ruin in all eyes but thine,
Are laid as level, and are left as bare,
As spots with no pretensions to resign;
Nor lives one relic that was deemed divine.
By thee, great sacrilegious Shade, all, all
Are swept away, and common weeds enshrine
That place of tombs and memories prodigal—
Itself a tomb at last, the record of its fall.
All then shall mingle fellowship with one,
And earth be strewn with wrecks of human things,
When tombs are broken up and memory's gone
Of proud aspiring mortals, crowned as kings,
Mere insects, sporting upon waxen wings
That melt at thy all-mastering energy;
And, when there's nought to govern, thy fame springs
To new existence, conquered, yet to be
An uncrowned partner still of dread eternity.