Explore "King Victor and King Charles" by Robert Browning on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
D'ORMEA _seated, folding papers he has been examining._
This at the last effects it: now, King Charles / Or else King Victor -- that's a balance: but now, / D'Ormea the arch-culprit, either turn / Of the scale, -- that's sure enough. A point to solve, / My masters, moralists, whate'er your style! / When you discover why I push myself / Into a pitfall you'd pass safely by, / Impart to me among the rest! No matter. / Prompt are the righteous ever with their rede / To us the wrongful: lesson them this once! / For safe among the wicked are you set, / D'Ormea! We lament life's brevity, / Yet quarter e'en the threescore years and ten, / Nor stick to call the quarter roundly "life. " / D'Ormea was wicked, say, some twenty years; / A tree so long was stunted; afterward, / What if it grew, continued growing, till / No fellow of the forest equalled it? / 'Twas a stump then; a stump it still must be: / While forward saplings, at the outset cheeked, / In virtue of that first sprout keep their style / Amid the forest's green fraternity. / Thus I shoot up to surely get lopped down / And bound up for the burning. Now for it!