Fitted their hour; the haunts that gave them birth,
The semi-chaos of the early earth,
The slime, the earthquake shock, the whelming flood,
Made battle ground for the colossal brood.
But now, when centuries of love and light
Have warmed and brightened man's old home; when might
Is not all sinister, nor all desire
Fierce appetite, that all-devouring fire,--
When life is not alone a wasting scourge,
But from the swamps of soulless strife emerge
Some Pisgah peaks of promise where the dove
Finds footing, high the whirling gulfs above,--
Now the intrusion of this loathly shape,
With pestilence-breathing jaws that blackly gape
For indiscriminate prey, is sure a thing
To set celestial guards once more a-wing;
To fire a new St. Michael or St. George
With the bright death to cleave the monster's gorge,
And trample out the Laidly Worm's last breath
In the convulsions of reluctant death.
A crawling, craven, sneaking, snaking brute;
Purposeless spite, and hatred absolute,
In hideous shape incarnate! Venomed Gad
In Civilisation's path; malignant-mad,
And blindly biting; raising an asp-neck
In Beauty's foot-tracks, and prepared to wreck
The ordered work of ages in a day,
To raze and shatter, to abase and slay.
Blind as the earthquake, headlong as the storm,
Yet in such hideous subter-human form,