Hope still.
To-morrow with dawn will come many a wain,
And bear away loads of human pain,
Piles of pale beds for the 'spitals; but some
Again will awake in home-mornings, and some,
Dull herds of the war, again follow the drum.
From others, faint blood shall in families flow,
With wonder at life, and young oldness in woe,
Yet hence may the movers of great earth grow.
Now, even now, I hear them at hand,
Though again Captain Sword is up in the land,
Marching anew for more fields like these
In the health of his flag in the morning breeze.

Sneereth the trumpet, and stampeth the drum,
And again Captain Sword in his pride doth come;
He passeth the fields where his friends lie lorn,
Feeding the flowers and the feeding corn,
Where under the sunshine cold they lie,
And he hasteth a tear from his old grey eye.
Small thinking is his but of work to be done,
And onward he marcheth, using the sun:
He slayeth, he wasteth, he spouteth his fires
On babes at the bosom, and bed-rid sires;
He bursteth pale cities, through smoke and through yell,
And bringeth behind him, hot-blooded, his hell.
Then the weak door is barr'd, and the soul all sore,
And hand-wringing helplessness paceth the floor,
And the lover is slain, and the parents are nigh--

Oh God! let me breathe, and look up at thy sky!
Good is as hundreds, evil as one;
Round about goeth the golden sun.

V.

HOW CAPTAIN SWORD, IN CONSEQUENCE OF HIS GREAT VICTORIES, BECAME INFIRM
IN HIS WITS.

But to win at the game, whose moves are death,
It maketh a man draw too proud a breath:
And to see his force taken for reason and right,
It tendeth to unsettle his reason quite.
Never did chief of the line of Sword
Keep his wits whole at that drunken board.
He taketh the size, and the roar, and fate,
Of the field of his action, for soul as great:
He smiteth and stunneth the cheek of mankind,
And saith "Lo! I rule both body and mind."

Captain Sword forgot his own soul,
Which of aught save itself, resented controul;
Which whatever his deeds, ord