Man's Cruelty To His Beast

I.
Man's cruel baseness to his beast!
  —Poor uncomplaining brute,
Its wrongs are innocent at least,
  And all its sorrows mute:
They cannot have deserved their woes,
  As these bad masters can;
And evil is the lot of those
  Who serve the tyrant, Man.

II.
I dare not let my fever'd thought
  Brood o'er the frightful page
By human malice writ and wrought
  In every clime and age!
Alas! the catalogue of crime
  Begun by cruel Cain
Has made the swollen stream of Time
  One cataract of pain!

III.
Lo! surgery's philosophic knife,
  Too merciless to kill,
Dissecting out the strings of life
  With calm and horrid skill,—
And bloody goads,— and wealing whips,
  And many a torture fell,
Have wrung from every creature's lips
  That Earth to them is Hell!

IV.
Yea: dream not that the Good and Wise
  To these can be unjust;
Nor, if not claimants for the skies,
  That all dissolve to dust:
They have a spirit which survives
  This caldron of unrest,
And here though wretched in their lives,
  Elsewhere they shall be blest!

V.
In the just Government and strong
  Of such a God as ours,
Only for wickedness and wrong
  Perpetual Judgment lours:
No creature ever ran a race
  Of griefs not earn'd before,
Without some compensating grace
  Of happiness in store!

VI.
Let this, then, comfort those who weep
  For Crime and Pity too;
For if just judgment doth not sleep,
  No more doth mercy true:
The cruel Man,— lament his fate,
  For he can reach no bliss;—
The tortured beast,— its future state
  Shall recompense for this.