The bolt from her abandoned heaven sped;
The snowy army rolling knoll on knoll

Beyond horizon, under no blest Cross:
By the vulture dotted and engarlanded.

Was it a necromancer lured
To weave his tense betraying spell?

A Titan whom our God endured
Till he of his foul hungers fell,

By all his craft and labour scourged?
A deluge Europe's liberated wave,

Paean to sky, leapt over that vast grave.
Its shadow-points against her sacred land converged.

And him, her yoke-fellow, her black lord, her fate,
In doubt, in fevered hope, in chills of hate,

That tore her old credulity to strips,
Then pressed the auspicious relics on her lips,

His withered slave for foregone miracles urged.
And he, whom now his ominous halo's round,

A three parts blank decrescent sickle, crowned,
Prodigious in catastrophe, could wear

The realm of Darkness with its Prince's air;
Assume in mien the resolute pretence

To satiate an hungered confidence,
Proved criminal by the sceptic seen to cower

Beside the generous face of that frail flower.
XIII

Desire and terror then had each of each:
His crown and sword were staked on the magic stroke;

Her blood she gave as one who loved her leech;
And both did barter under union's cloak.

An union in hot fever and fierce need
Of either's aid, distrust in trust did breed.

Their traffic instincts hooded their live wits
To issues. Never human fortune throve

On such alliance. Viewed by fits,
From Vulcan's forge a hovering Jove

Evolved. The slave he dragged the Tyrant drove.
Her awe of him his dread of her invoked:

His nature with her shivering faith ran yoked.
What wisdom counselled, Policy declined;

All perils dared he save the step behind.
Ahead his grand initiative becked:

One spark of radiance blurred, his orb was wrecked.
Stripped to the despot upstart, for success

He raged to clothe a perilous nakedness.
He would not fall, while falling; would not be taught,

While learning; would not relax his grasp on aught
He held in hand, while losing it; pressed advance,

Pricked for her lees the veins of wasted France;
Who, had he stayed to husband her, had spun

The strength he taxed unripened for his throw,
In vengeful casts calamitous,

On fields where palsying Pyrrhic laurels grow,
The luminous the ruinous.

An incalescent scorpion,
And fierier for the mounded cirque

That narrowed at him thick and murk,
This gambler with his genius

Flung lives in angry volleys, bloodylightnings, flung
His fortunes to the hosts he stung,

With victories clipped his eagle's wings.
By the hands that built him up was he undone:

By the star aloft, which was his ram's-head will
Within; by the toppling throne the soldier won;

By the yeasty ferment of what once had been,
To cloud a rational mind for present things;

By his own force, the suicide in his mill.
Needs never God of Vengeance intervene

When giants their last lesson have to learn.
Fighting against an end he could discern,

The chivalrywhereof he had none
He called from his worn slave's abundant springs:

Not deigning spousally entreat
That ever blinded by his martial skill,

But harsh to have her worship counted out
In human coin, her vital rivers drained,

Her infant forests felled, commanded die
The decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat,

Where throning he her faith in him maintained;
Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat

Was triumph; and what strength in her remained
To head against the ultimateforeseen rout,

Insensate taxed; of his impenitent will,
Servant and sycophant: without ally,

In Python's coils, the Master Craftsman still;
The smiter, panther springer, trapper sly,

The deadly wrestler at the crucial bout,
The penetrant, the tonant, tower of towers,

Striking from black disasterstarry showers.
Her supremeplayer of man's primaeval game,

He won his harnessed victim's rapturous shout,
When every move was mortal to her frame,

Her prayer to life that stricken he might lie,
She to exchange his laurels for earth's flowers.

The innumerable whelmed him, and he fell:
A vessel in mid-ocean under storm.

Ere ceased the lullaby of his passing bell,
He sprang to sight, in human form

Revealed, from no celestial aids:
The shades enclosed him, and he fired the shades.

Cannon his name,
Cannon his voice, he came.

The fount of miracles from drought-dust arose,
Amazing even on his Imperial stage,

Where marvels lightened through the alternate hours
And winged o'er human earth's heroical shone.

Into the press of cumulative foes,
Across the friendly fields of smoke and rage,

A broken structure bore his furious powers;
The man no more, the Warrior Chief the same;

Match for all rivals; in himself but flame
Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon.

Yet loud as when he first showed War's effete
Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high,

And summoned to subject who dared compete,
The cannon in the name Napoleon

Discoursed of sulphur earth to curtained sky.
So through a tropic day a regnant sun,

Where armies of assailant vapours thronged,
His glory's trappings laid on them: comes night,

Enwraps him in a bosom quick of heat
From his anterior splendours, and shall seem

Day instant, Day's own lord in the furnace gleam,
The virulent quiver on ravished eyes prolonged,

When severed darkness, all flaminical bright,
Slips vivid eagles linked in rapid flight;

Which bring at whiles the lionly far roar,
As wrestled he with manacles and gags,

To speed across a cowering world once more,
Superb in ordered floods, his lordly flags.

His name on silence thundered, on the obscure
Lightened; it haunted morn and even-song:

Earth of her prodigy's extinction long,
With shudderings and with thrillings, hung unsure.

Snapped was the chord that made the resonant bow,