Page:The roamer and other poems (1920).djvu/76

66 The brute made brain, the crime intelligent,

Time's last-born type of man; instant they saw

The black revolver pouring livid flame,

And heard the sullen, detonating bomb,

The dread of royal capitals; he laughed,

And thinly the fierce smile laid bare his teeth:

"An ugly shape, signore; not bred like yours,

Not from the gods of Greece and loins of Rome,

Nor Roncesvalles, Acre and Agincourt;

Spawned in the European gutter-slime;

Us Paris pours, when, sick and ravening,

The beast of blood upon her entrails gnaws,

And the state cries, 'To arms, they come, they come!'

As come they will until the shuddering bulk

Of government misused for misery

Reels and collapses in the social fall.

March on, march on, great Host! guerrillas we,

Isolate scouts stalking a sleepy world;

Nor think in horrid Muscovy alone

We range and prosper; fast we multiply

On every barren crag where freedom clings,

On Switzer-peak, in high Calabrian caves,

Rhine-cellars, and the Belgian, Spanish holes,

And where the English speech rears her vast orb

O'er half the world, sheltering forevermore