It was given me to know
They had sate from dateless time,
Watchful from their thrones sublime,
O'er the altar-place below,
Their armour was of mould foregone:
With strange lights their helmets shone.
On their shields the hosts of heaven
Were inwrought, a scroll was given
On each pedestal, to tell
How they triumphed, fought and fell;
But those records mocked the eye,
The language of a world gone by.

Visioned with the inward sight,
I saw by that prescient light,
They were Kings pre-Adamite;
Of that giant race of might,
Titans of the earlier earth,
Who from heaven traced their birth,
Till they, in their ancestral pride,
Time, and death, and God defied.
They were mortal foes, and made
Man against man stand arrayed;
From earth's iron womb they drew
The steel with which her sons they slew,
And filled the world with slaughtering bands;
Then fell beneath each other's hands.