I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla
The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck quiet
...
The world's as the world is; the nations rearm and prepare to
change; the age of tyrants returns;
...
These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur
of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
...
Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions,
Knowing all the while that civilization and the other evils
That make humanity ridiculous, remain
...
A desert of weed and water-darkened stone under my western
windows
The ebb lasted all afternoon,
...
White-maned, wide-throated, the heavy-shouldered children of
the wind leap at the sea-cliff.
The invisible falcon
...
The ocean has not been so quiet for a long while; five nightherons
Fly shorelong voiceless in the hush of the air
...
After all, we also stand on a height. Our blood and our culture
have passed the flood-marks of any world
Up to this time. Our engineers have nothing to learn from Rome's,
Egypt's, China's, and could teach them more
...
The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of
water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness
...
Steep up in Lubitavish townland stands
A ring of great stones like fangs, the shafts of the stones
...