dressed,
To paint the feelings of his hopeless breast.

XIX.

His withered prospects blacken--wounds await--
The grave grows sunlight to his darker fate.
All now is gall and bitterness within,
And thoughts, once sternly pure, half yield to sin.
His sickened soul, in all its native pride,
Swells 'neath the breast that tattered vestments hide
Disdained, disdaining; while men flourish, he
Still stands a stately though a withered tree.
But, Heavens! the agony of the moment when
Suspicion stamped the smiles of other men;
When friends glanced _doubts_, and proudly prudent grew,
His counsellors, and his accusers too!

XX.

Picture his pain, his misery, when first
His growing wants their proud concealment burst;
When the first tears start from his stubborn soul.
Big, burning, solitary drops, that roll
Down his pale cheek--the momentary gush
Of human weakness--till the whirlwind rush
Of pride, of shame, had dashed them from his eye,
And his swollen heart heaved mad with agony!
Then, then the pain--the infinity of feeling--
Words fail to paint its anguish. Reason, reeling,
Staggered with torture through his burning brain,
While his teeth gnashed with bitterness and pain;
Reflection grew a scorpion, speech had fled,
And all but madness and despair were dead.

XXI.

He slept to dream of death, or worse than death;
For death were bliss, and the convulsive wrath
Of living torture peace, to the dread weight
That pressed upon sensation, while the light
Of reason gleamed but horror, and strange hosts
Of hideous phantasies, like threatening ghosts.
Grotesquely mingled, preyed upon his brain:
Then would he dream of yesterdays again,
Or view to-morrow's terrors thick surround
His fancy with forebodings. While the sound
Of his own breath broke frightful on his ear,
He, bathed in icy sweat, would start in fear,
Trembling and pale; then did his glances seem
Sad as the sun's last, conscious, farewell gleam
Upon the eve of judgment. Such appear
His days and nights whom hope has ceased to cheer
But grov'llers know it not. The supple slave
Whose worthiest record is a nameless grave,
Whose truckling spirit bends and bids him kneel,
And fawn and vilely kiss a patron's heel--
Even _he_ can cast the cursed suspicious eye,
Inquire the _cause_ of _this_--the _reason why_?
And stab the sufferer. Then, the tenfold pain
To feel a gilded butterfly's disdain!--
A kicking ass, without an ass's sense,
Whose only virtue is, pound