, consumed alive with disease;
Boys and men tortured to fiends and branded with shuddering fire;
Girls and women shrieking caught, and whored, and trampled to death in
the mire;
Babyhood, youth, and manhood and womanhood that might have been,
Kneaded, a bloody pulp, to feed the gold-grinding murderous Machine!

And still, with aching eyeballs, I stared at that hateful sight,
At the long dense lines of the people and the shafts and wheels of
might,
When slowly, slowly emerging, I saw a great Globe rise,
Blood-red on the dim horizon, and it swam up into the skies.
But whether indeed it were the sun or the moon, I could not say,
For I knew not now in my watching if it were night or day.
But when that Great Globe steadied above the central Wheel,
The thronged battalions wavered and paused, and an awful silence fell.

Then (I know not how, but so it was) in a moment the flash of an eye--
A murmur ran and rose to a voice, and the voice to a terrible cry:
"Enough, enough! It has had enough! We will march no more till we
drop
In the furnace Pit. Give us food! Give us rest! Though the accursed
Machinery stop!"
And then, with a shout of angry fear, the Revellers sprang to their
feet,
And the call was for cannon and cavalry, for rifle and bayonet.
And one rose up, a leader of them, lifting a threatening rod.
And "Stop the Machinery!" he yelled, "you might as well stop God!"

But the terrible thunder-cry replied: "If this indeed must be,
It is YOU should be cast to the furnace Pit to feed the Machine--not
WE!"
And the central Wheel enormous slowed down in groaning plight,
And all the aerial movement ceased of the shafts and wheels of might,
And a superhuman clamour leaped madly to where overhead
The great Globe swung in the gathering gloom, portentous, huge,
blood-red!
But my brain whirled round and my blinded eyes no more could see or
know,
Till I struggling seemed to awake at last by the swollen, sullen flow
Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth
and Woe!

DIRGE.
(_Brisbane_.)
"_A little Soldier of the Army of the Night_."

Bury him without a word!
No appeal to death;
Only the call of the bird
And the blind spring's breath.

Nature slays ten, yet the one
Reaches but to a part
Of what's to be done, to be sung.
Keep we a prou