To the vigilance of my exertions a lax pause,

Offering in the vehicle and wavering colour of evening

My weakness to my judgement, whether it may be a fault

Of defect or excess in me, or whether most

Not from a sort of habit of having what I say go for nothing?

For although I had allowed (I hardly shall allow)

That fable of persuasion, should I have no title to surprise

Upon felicitations of failure? And yet it is the time,

And I own as I ought to do, I have failed, I shall fail

Failing with the aid of all the images you may choose

For the proprieties of sentiment and the canons

Of a liquid eloquence; of links

Of favouring lights, of medals, of hinges, my grammar

My logic, vocables like faggots, triple cords, gongs, florets

A whole chivalry of leaves: I mean

An inordinate number of decorated reflections branching

Into how many more I have hinted at, as well as joints

Fans and ligaments and horns. I am an artisan of fire.

Far as this our business bearing me, thus far am I led to set

My ripe steps on a way I see before me, a soft pace

That tests it as to the use I may be of in the sorrows we

Have seen too much of. But since the times

Will come to worse: and neither the senate nor the soldier, not seeing

As I do, great London like a fuscous rose, her door-ways

Warm with the flux of quality, her shops bundles of muslin sown with rubies,

Her frigates tilted above the mud at low tide, and the town

Like a heap of fresh wet stars; and neither

The mushrooms of her markets, nor her polity nor her pravity

Will observe the secreted city of the speaker: let then this

Be to the other a sepulchre. Advanced I have my city,

And under the glimmering decadence of heaven, deepened, Displayed the broad and dividing streets, the close columns

Of a sea-stone, the straitened palaces, the shallow quadrants

Vacated theatres, full graves and the temple trembling

To the least word. And I have watched it,