Excerpt from The Fires of Baal Thereafter he rose up Mighty of stature as a mountain shepherd Against the clouds, majestic and undimmed By age and spoke among the patriarchs Gathered around the golden threshold ways O Greatest of Israel who in grievous years Have known the dragon Nile uncoil, and night Burning around the brood of heathen gods, Dagon and the false woman, Ashtoroth, Whose rites are midnight beds, or Belial The drunken idol, that gained them crowded realms Betwixt the brazen gates of Babylon, Balbec and darker citied lands, dragging Kings down though choked with richest frankincense And pillaged fire how men took barren swords To wife, and from the smoke of burning plains Hissing with floods, Nimrod, the sun-black king Came with his snarling chariots to build great walls Of brass, and arrogant in his fierce brain Brandished the towered earth against its sky, And thought to topple heaven with a curse; And how through myriads our jealous God Has led us from the locust fields of bondage And hidden on the darkening heights of Sinai. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.