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Thou! what hast thou to do with a time burnt out and done?
With the old Serbonian bog-- the marshes where nations were lost?
Where wailings are heard of the dead, of the slaughtered Roman and Hun,
And phosphorent lights arise in the hands of a stricken ghost,
Dreaming of splendors of battle that glanced from a million shields,
When the Cesars pillaged for lust of gold and hunger of power;
And the giants of Gothland festered and stank on the stretching fields,
And the gods of the living were cursed, too weak to reveal the hour,
When they should triumph and others should writhe in a dread defeat,
In the day of thy grace, O fair and false to thy fathers and time,
O thou whom the snares of kings already encompass thy feet,
With thy singing robes besprent with the old Egyptian slime.