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Rh Behold them, stricken, silent, weak,

The maimed, the mute. the halt, the blind,

Condemned in hopeless hope to seek

The thing which they shall never find.

They haunt the shadows of your ways

In masks of perishable mould:

Their souls a changing flesh arrays,

But they are changeless from of old.

Their lips repeat an empty call,

But silence wraps their thoughts around.

On them, like snow, the ages fall;

Time muffles all this transient sound.

When Shalmaneser pitched his tent

By Tigris, and his flag unfurled,

And forth his summons proudly sent

Into the new unconquered world;

Or when with spears Cambyses rode

Through Memphis and her bending slaves,

Or first the Tyrian gazed abroad

Upon the bright vast outer waves;

When sages, star-instructed men,

To the young glory of Babylon

Foreknew no ending; even then

Innumerable years had flown,

Since first the chisel in her hand

Necessity, the sculptor, took,

And in her spacious meaning planned

These forms, and that eternal look;

These foreheads, moulded from afar,

These soft, unfathomable eyes,

Gazing from darkness, like a star;

These lips, whose grief is to be wise.

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