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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:
For flowers-as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,
You'd think; a burr had been a treasure trove.

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,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;

He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

XV

I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.
As a man calls for wine before he fights,
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards-the soldier's art :
One taste of the old time sets all to rights.

XVI

Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face
Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
An arm in mine to fix me to the place,
That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace !
Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold.

XVII

Giles then, the soul of honour-there he stands
Frank as ten years ago when knighted first.
What honest man should dare (he said) he durst.
Good-but the scene shifts-faugh! what hangman
hands

Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands
Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!

XVIII

Better this present than a past like that;
Back therefore to my darkening path again!

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;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit

Of mute despair, a suicidal throng :

The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.

XXI

Which, while I forded,-good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
-It may have been a water-rat I speared,
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek.

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,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage--

XXIII

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.
What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it. Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

XXIV

And more than that-a furlong on-why, there !
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel-that harrow fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware,

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,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil 's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;

Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

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,
'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains-with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me,—solve it, you !
How to get from them was no clearer case.

XXIX

Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when—
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts-you 're inside the den.

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,
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf

He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

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