A hand of fire across his temples passed;
He ran, as in the terror of a dream,
To quench his burning anguish in the stream;
But, bending o’er the brink, the swelling wave
Back to his eye the branded visage gave;
As soon on murdered Abel durst he look:
Yet power to fly his palsied limbs forsook;
There turned to stone, for his presumptuous crime,
A monument of wrath to latest time,
Might Cain have stood; but mercy raised his head