Hagride

Ye Cardinal Wolves, tear up his Royal Bones, / Do, if you dare! keep your Prerogative / To hector Kingdoms, and to hag-ride Kings.

[He] complains of painful, ominous dreams, which are the bane, the imbitterers of nature’s second feast, hag-riding his imagination all night;

[I] beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the bandage all bloody—horror!—the fisher-wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight.

Surely the conception of a Ministry of Love, whose towering office hagrides the city because each citizen believes it has calculated for him the torture he would find most unbearable, corresponds to nothing in Communism and a great deal in the history of Christianity.