That swarms with devils spawn'd from her damn'd charms.
For the red light of burning burgs and farms
Oozes all round, beneath the lock'd black lids
Of heaven. Something on the air forbids
A creature to feel happy, or at rest.
The night is curs'd, and carries in her breast
A guilty conscience. Strange, too! since of late
The Church is busy, putting all things straight,
And taking comfortable care to keep
The fold snug, and all prowlers from the sheep.
To which good end, upon this self-same night,
A much dismay'd Town Council has thought right
To set a Guard of Terror round about
The great Cathedral; fearing lest a rout
Of these misguided creatures, prone to sin,
As lately proven, should break rudely in
There, where Adolfus, Duke of Guelders, and
Other dead Dukes by whom this happy land
Was once kept quiet in good times gone by,
With saints and bishops sleeping quietly,
Enjoy at last the slumber of the just;
In marble; mixing not their noble dust
With common clay of the inferior dead.
Therefore you hear, with moody measured tread,
This Guard of Terror going its grim watch,
Thro' ominous silence. Scarce sufficient match
However, even for a hundred lean
Starved wretches, lasht to madness, having seen
Somewhat too long, or too unworthily lookt
Upon, their vile belongings being cookt
To suit each priestly palate . . . . If to-night
Those mad dogs slip the muzzle, 'ware their bite!

And so, perchance, the thankless people thought:
For, as the night wore off, a much-distraught
And murmurous crowd came thronging wild to where
I'the market place, each stifled thoroughfare
Disgorges its pent populace about
The great Cathedral.
                                       Suddenly, a shout,
As tho' Hell's brood had broken loose, rockt all
Heaven's black roof dismal and funereal.
As when a spark is dropt into a train
Of nitre, swiftly ran from brain to brain,
A single fiery purpose, and at last
Exploded, roaring down the vague and vast
Heart of the shaken city. Then a swell
Of wrathful faces, irresistible,
Sweep to the great Cathedral doors; disarm
The Guard; roar up the hollow nave; and swarm
Thro' aisle and chancel, fast as locusts sent
Thro' Egypt's chambers thick and pestilent.

There, such a sight was seen, as now and then
When half a world goes mad, makes sober men
In after years, who comfortably sit
In easy chairs to weigh and ponder it,
Revise the various theories of mankind,
Puzzling both others and themselves, to find
New reasons for unreasonable old wrongs.

Yells, howlings, cursings; grim tumultuous throngs;
The metamorphoses of mad despair:
Men with wolves' faces, women with fierce hair
And frenzied eyes, turn'd furies: over all
The torchlight tossing in perpetual
Pulsation of tremendous glare or gloom.
They climb, they cling from altar-piece and tomb;
Whilst pickaxe, crowbar, pitchfork, billet, each
Chance weapon caught within the reckless reach
Of those whose single will a thousand means
Subserve to (. . . . terrible, wild kings and queens
Whose sole dominions are despairs . . . .), thro' all
The marble monuments majestical
Go crashing. Basalt, lapis, syenite,
Porphyry, and pediment, in splinters bright,
Tumbled with claps of thunder, clattering
Roll down the dark. The surly sinners sing
A horrible black santis, so to cheer
The work in hand. And evermore you hear
A shout of awful joy, as down goes some
Three-hundred-years-old treasure. Crowded, come
To glut the greatening bonfire, chalices
Of gold and silver, copes and cibories,
Stain'd altar-cloths, spoil'd pictures, ornaments,
Statues, and broken organ tubes and vents,
The spoils of generations all destroy'd
In one wild moment! Possibly grown cloy'd
And languid, then a lean iconoclast,
Drooping a sullen eyelid, fell at last
To reading lazily the letters that
Ran round the royal tomb on which he sat.
When (suddenly inspired with some new hate
To yells, the hollow roofs reverberate
As tho' the Judgment-Angel pass'd among
Their rafters, and the great beams clang'd and rung
Against his griding wing) he shrieks: "Come forth,
Adolfus, Duke of Guelders! for thy worth
Should not be hidden." Forthwith, all men shout,
"Strike, split, crash, dig, and drag the tyrant out!
Let him be judged! " And from the drowsy, dark,
Enormous aisles, a hundred echoes bark
And bellow—"Judged!"
                                     Then those dread lictors all,
Marching before the magisterial
Curule of tardy Time, with rod and axe,
Fall to their work. The cream-white marble cracks,
The lucid alabaster flies in flakes,
The iron bindings burst, the brickwork quakes
Beneath their strokes, and the great stone lid shivers
With thunder on the pavement. A torch quivers
Over the yawning vault. The vast crowd draws
Its breath back hissing. In that sultry pause
A man o'erstrides the tomb, and drops beneath;
Another; then another. Still its breath
The crowd holds, hushful. At the last appears,
Unravaged by a hundred wicked years,
Borne on broad shoulders from the tomb to which
Broad shoulders bore him; coming, in his rich
Robes of magnificence (by sweating thumbs
Of savage artisans,—as each one comes
To stare into his dead face,—smeared and smudged),
Adolfus, Duke of Guelders, . . . . to be Judged!

And then, and there, in that strange judgment-hall,
As, gathering round their royal criminal,
Troopt the wild jury, the dead Duke was found
To be as fresh in face, in flesh as sound,
As tho' he had been buried yesterday;
So well the embalmer's work from all decay
Had kept his royal person. With his great
Grim truncheon propt on hip, his robe of state
Heap'd in vast folds his large-built limbs around,
The Duke lay, looking as in life; and frown'd
A frown that seem'd as of a living man.
Meanwhile those judges their assize began.

And, having, in incredibly brief time,
Decided that in nothing save his crime
The Duke exceeded mere humanity,
Free, for the first time, its own cause to try
So long ignored,—they peeled him, limb by limb,
Bare of the mingled pomps that mantled him;
Stript, singed him, stabb'd him, stampt upon him, smote
His cheek, and spat upon it, slit his throat,
Crusht his big brow, and clove his crown, and left