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XXII.
Still, heaven deferr’d the hour ordain’d to rend
From saintly rottenness the sacred stole;
And cowl and worshipp’d shrine could still defend
The wretch with felon stains upon his soul;
And crimes were set to sale, and hard his dole
Who could not bribe a passage to the skies;
And vice beneath the mitre’s kind controul,
Sinn’d gaily on, and grew to giant size,
Shielded by priestly power, and watch’d by priestly eyes.
XXIII.
At last the earthquake came—the shock, that hurl’d
To earth, in many fragments dash’d and strown,
The throne, whose roots were in another world,
And whose far stretching shadow aw’d our own.
From many a proud monastick pile, o’erthrown,
Fear-struck, the hooded inmates rush’d and fled;
The web, that for a thousand years had grown
O’er prostrate Europe, in that day of dread
Crumbled and fell, as fire dissolves the flaxen thread.
