_"Oh! spare dual idols of the past,
Whose lips are dumb, whose eyes are dim;
Truth's diadem is not for him
Who comes, the fierce Iconoclast:
Who wakes the battle's stormy blast,
Hears not the angel's choral hymn" _
THE IMAGE-BREAKER


Ah me! for we have fallen on evil days,
When science, with remorseless cold precision,
Puts out the flame of poetry, and lays
Her double-convex lens on fancy's vision.
When not a star has longer leave to shine,
Unweighed, unanalysed, reduced to gases,--
Resolved to something in the chemist's line,
By those miraculously long-ranged glasses.

The awful mysteries which Nature locks
Deep in her stony bosom, hid for ages,--
The hieroglyphics of primeval rocks,
Are glibly written out on short-hand pages.
Within that rocky scroll, her palimpsest,
The hand of time still writes, and still effaces
Records in dolomite--and shale--and schist,
The pre-historic history of Races.

Cave-dwellers, under nameless strata hid,