Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/62

52 And evil filled him, and his heart was stone.

His generations lust and avarice were,

Since first the barbarous hordes from cave and fen

Issued with slanting foreheads, hanging lips,

Chippers of flint; new-weaponing their hate

With bronze and iron; clan and tribe and race

Hostile; and yoked beneath the deadliest arm

Conglomerate the Asian state rose up,

An army and a priesthood and a king.

Lie deep, white Death, on that hoar infamy!

Time turns his glass; far shines the Attic hill,

And sevenfold Rome o'er her dead marshes frowns,

And Carthage from her markets looks across!

Alas, the darling city barbarized;

Alas, the proud dominion's buried wrack;

Alas, the sand-blown desert tenantless!

Temples and palaces and war-girt forts,

Letters and arms and jewelled hoards of trade,

Far continents and undiscovered isles,

A hundred empires fall! nor deem thyself,

Proud age, excepted; still the reek of death

Breathes in thy nostrils; the black march begins

Wherewith the jealous nations sow revenge;

And peace in all thy borders whets a war

More fell, the mighty grapple joined world-wide,

The commonwealth a meaner mask of war,