Page:Two Mock Epics (Hanuman and Tantum Religio), Lyrics, Post Meridian Verse, The Turret Captain's Toast and other Verses.pdf/91

 Thou eyrey of the faith! impaled

On spears, their little lives exhaled.

Above thy smooth rock-platform boys

Of tenderest age, and infants flung

From the sheer edge, in torments hung

Wedged into clefts, or bleeding clung

To splintered spires or round them coiled

Convulsive, or like broken toys

By their own childish fingers spoiled

In days of sunny infancy,

Lo! broken on the ground they lie

Beneath the glaring azure sky!

Is memory: of that glorious past

In Sondrian hearts so wholly quenched

That, dubious, now we stand aghast,

By yonder crackpate’s rhetoric drenched?

Where is the stern will nought requires

To spur it to heroic deeds,

The strong, just purpose of our sires

To crush, ere sown, sedition’s seeds?

O glorious butchery! the names

Of the great dead that fed thy flames

Scarce linger in the halls they reared,

Where once they rang beloved and feared.

In Besta’s home the rafter falls

And goitrous squalor throngs the halls,

And through the desecrated court

The Cretin wails his vanished thought.

In Tirano, no more thy name,

O Robustelli! heroes claim,

That once tremendous sped the flood

Of death to Adda running blood: