Than, pausing to throw backward a last view O'er the safe road, 't was gone; grey plain all round: Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. I might go on; nought else remained to do. X So, on I went. I think I never saw Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: XI No! penury, inertness and grimace, "See In some strange sort, were the land's portion. "Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly, "It nothing skills: I cannot help my case: ""T is the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place, "Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free." XII If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk All hope of greenness ? 't is a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents. XIII As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, Stood stupefied, however he came there : Thrust out past service from the devil's stud! XIV Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, He must be wicked to deserve such pain. XV I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart. XVI Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face XVII Giles then, the soul of honour-there he stands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands XVIII Better this present than a past like that; No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain. Will the night send a howlet or a bat? I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train. XIX A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof-to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes. XX So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Of mute despair, a suicidal throng : The river which had done them all the wrong, XXI Which, while I forded,-good saints, how I feared XXII Glad was I when I reached the other bank. Now for a better country. Vain presage ! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank, XXIII The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque. XXIV And more than that-a furlong on-why, there ! Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. XXV Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood— Bog, clay, and rubble, sand and stark black dearth. XXVI Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him XXVII And just as far as ever from the end, Nought in the distance but the evening, nought To point my footstep further! At the thought, A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend, Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap-perchance the guide I sought. XXVIII For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, XXIX Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick XXX Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Couched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight, While, to the left, a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, He strikes on, only when the timbers start. |