Forgive me, but grand words are not my trick; I cut a sorry figure here, I know, But you would laugh at my high rhetoric If you’d not left off laughing long ago. The solar system I must leave unsung, And to mankind’s woes lend my humbler tongue. 280 The little earth-god still persists in his old ways, Ridiculous as ever, as in his first days. He’d have improved if you’d not given Him a mere glimmer of the light of heaven; He calls it Reason, and it only has increased
