So we pilgrim'd on together, buffeting the ills about us,
Sharing hope, and joy, and sorrow, as we shared our daily bread,
Keeping still a pleasaunce scathless in our hearts, though all without us
Might be cheerless desolation, and the sky with clouds o'erspread.
Through much toil and tribulation, we attain'd at last to honour
With no succour from my kindred, I upreared my house alone,
And I see my cherish'd maiden, with admiring gazes on her,
Glide amid the high and noble with a grace beyond their own.
And those proud ones now are gracious, bowing fawningly before her,
Whilst she with her true eyes calmly takes the measure of their hearts,
Weighs aright the honied speeches, and the praise they heap upon her,
Her own innocence instinctively disarming all their arts.
For she knows their tongues are venal, sold to flatter wealth and power,
And to crouch with serpent homage in the dust at Fortune's shrine,
Ready to revile and slander if calamity should lower,
And to flout as base, deceitful, what they late had termed divine.
Thus unmask'd and sifted throughly let them stoop and fawn at pleasure,
Little reck I to revenge me better for their former spite
As I mark their degradation falling on them in full measure
When they humble themselves vilely, thus, to one who reads them right.
THE STORMY PETREL.
Far in the wilderness of waves,
Where vision dieth 'mid endless motion,
Where only the madden'd storm-wind raves,
And sinketh its chains in the soundless ocean;
Far from the ken and the power of men,
And lone as though Earth were in chaos again,
The Stormy Petrel cleaveth the air,
And maketh the surging billow its lair.
The black cloud scuddeth along on high,
Silent and swift as the angel Death,
Led by Euroclydon through the sky
Unto its victim with bated breath,
Whilst only God and the Petrel seeth
The path by which the Avenger fleeth,
And with shrill accent of wail and mourning
Riseth the Petrel's wild cry of warning.