Page:The Man Who Died Twice (1924).djvu/42

 Behind him in a world that would have loved him

Only the more for being out of it.

That long orchestral onslaught of redemption

Would have exonerated flesh and folly

And been his everlasting epitaph—

Which time would then have read as variously

As men are various in their ways and means

Of reading. That would have cancelled everything,

And all his earthly debts—or left him willing

To pay them peradventure as they might

Or must be paid. But they had run too long.

His birthright, signed away in fettered sloth

To the most ingenious and insatiable

Of usurers, had all vanished; and the more

He might have been a king, the more their greed

Would mock him and his tatters, and abase him;