Hot was their quarrel till the day they died,
Caught, in red anger, by the great bog-slide,
The sudden slipping of the mountain-side,
After long rains, that trapped them in the byre,
Overwhelmed by ten million tons of mire
That crushed out all that fiery energy
Of hate that was their very breath of life:
And, buried under that black bog, they lay,
Hateless at last; and even the memory
Of them and of their unrelenting strife
Obliterated by catastrophe,
And quenched for ever in the quaggy smother—
Though each of them had reckoned, at Doomsday,
To rise and stand before the Judgement Seat,
Demanding God's just vengeance on the other.

And, one day, a hill-shepherd, cutting peat,
May turn up those cold bones, and little guess,
Looking upon their pitiful nakedness,
How once those frames were frenzied with an ire,
To which the glowing core of his hearth-fire
Were merely ice—yet, like a candle, caught
In a chance gust, puffed out; and so was naught
But dust and ashes, as all ecstasies
Of love and anger, joys and agonies,
And all the passions that plague man from birth,
Are lapped at last in unimpassioned earth.