Page:Queen Mab (Shelley).djvu/27

II. :Strangers, and ships, and merchandize:
 * Once peace and freedom blest
 * The cultivated plain:
 * But wealth, that curse of man,

Blighted the bud of its prosperity: Virtue and wisdom, truth and liberty, Fled, to return not, until man shall know
 * That they alone can give the bliss
 * Worthy a soul that claims
 * Its kindred with eternity.


 * There's not one atom of yon earth
 * But once was living man;
 * Nor the minutest drop of rain,
 * That hangeth in its thinnest cloud,
 * But flowed in human veins:
 * And from the burning plains
 * Where Lybian monsters yell,
 * From the most gloomy glens
 * Of Greenland's sunless clime,
 * To where the golden fields
 * Of fertile England spread
 * Their harvest to the day,
 * Thou canst not find one spot
 * Whereon no city stood.


 * How strange is human pride!
 * I tell thee that those living things,
 * To whom the fragile blade of grass,
 * That springeth in the morn
 * And perisheth ere noon,