That heterogeneous thing, an Englishman.

An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.

Vile man, begot of clay, and born of dust.

Vile man, begot of clay, and born of dust.

An Edward's England spat us out - a band
Foredoomed to redden Vistula or Rhine,
And leaf-like toss with every wind malign.
All mocked the faith they could not understand.

Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!

He was the worst sort of gentry—the sort that mistakes the luck of birth for an actual accomplishment. As if he chose to be born into money and title and had nothing but contempt for those of us lacking the foresight to do the same.

Drawn by Conceit from Reason's plan,
How vain is that poor creature, Man!
How pleased is every paltry elf
To prate about that thing, himself.

Man in sooth is a marvellous, vain, fickle, and unstable subject.

What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!

This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hence vain deluding Joys,
The brood of Folly without father bred!

He was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas day
When the New York Times said God is dead
And the war's begun.