To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer; A new Actæon's error
Shall theirs have been-devoured by their own hounds! Be thou like the imperial Basilisk, Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds! Gaze on oppression, till, at that dread risk Aghast, she pass from the Earth's disk; Fear not, but gaze-for freemen mightier grow, And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe. If Hope, and Truth, and Justice may avail, Thou shalt be great.-All hail!
ANTISTROPHE 3. 2.
From Freedom's form divine, From Nature's inmost shrine.
Strip every impious gawd, rend error veil by veil : O'er ruin desolate,
O'er Falsehood's fallen state,
Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale! And equal laws be thine,
And winged words let sail,
Freighted with truth even from the throne of God That wealth, surviving fate, be thine.-All hail !
Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling pean From land to land re-echoed solemnly, Till silence became music? From the Exan* To the cold Alps, eternal Italy
Starts to hear thine! The Sea
Which paves the desert streets of Venice, laughs In light and music; widowed Genoa wan, By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs, Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan, Within whose veins long ran
The viper's palsying venom, lifts her heel To bruise his head. The signal and the seal (If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail) Art thou of all these hopes.-O hail !
ANTISTROPHE S. y.
Florence! beneath the sun,
Of cities fairest one,
Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expectation: From eyes of quenchless hope
Rome tears the priestly cope,
As ruling once by power, so now by admiration,- An athlete stript to run
* Exa, the Island of Circe.
The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.
For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore :- As then Hope. Truth, and Justice did avail, So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail ! EPODE I. 8.
Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms Arrayed against the ever-living Gods? The crash and darkness of a thousand storms Bursting their inaccessible abodes
Of crags and thunder-clouds?
See ye the banners blazoned to the day, Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride? Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,
The Serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide With iron light is dyed,
The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating;
An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions And lawless slaveries,-down the aerial regions Of the white Alps, desolating,
Famished wolves that bide no waiting, Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory, Trampling our columned cities into dust, Their dull and savage lust
On Beauty's corse to sickness satiating
They come ! The fields they tread look black and hoary With fire-from their red feet the streams run gory!
Great Spirit, deepest Love! Which rulest and dost move
All things which live and are, within the Italian shore; Who spreadest heaven around it,
Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it;
Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's western floor, Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison! From the Earth's bosom chill;
O bid those beams be each a blinding brand Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison! Bid the Earth's plenty kill!
Bid thy bright Heaven above
Whilst light and darkness bound it, Be their tomb who planned
To make it ours and thine !
Or, with thine harmonising ardours fill
And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire-
Be man's high hope and unextinct desire
The instrument to work thy will divine!
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,
And frowns and fears from Thee,
Would not more swiftly flee,
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.- Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine Thou yieldest or withholdest, oh let be This City of thy worship, ever free!
It was a bright and cheerful afternoon, Towards the end of the sunny month of June, When the north wind congregates in crowds The floating mountains of the silver clouds From the horizon-and the stainless sky Opens beyond them like eternity.
All things rejoiced beneath the sun, the weeds,
The river, and the corn-fields, and the reeds;
The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze, And the firm foliage of the larger trees.
It was a winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes A wrinkled clod, as hard as brick; and when, Among their children, comfortable men Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold: Alas! then for the homeless beggar old!
ALAS! good friend, what profit can you see In hating such a hateless thing as me? There is no sport in hate where all the rage Is on one side. In vain would you assuage Your frowns upon an unresisting smile, In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile Your heart, by some faint sympathy of hate. Oh conquer what you cannot satiate! For to your passion I am far more coy Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy In winter noon. Of your antipathy If I am the Narcissus you are free To pine into a sound with hating me.
THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying, And the year
On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying;
Come, months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array; Follow the bier
Of the dead cold year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.
The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling, The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone To his dwelling;
Come, months, come away; Put on white, black, and grey, Let your light sisters play- Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.
TELL me, thou star, whose wings of light Speed thee in thy fiery flight,
In what cavern of the night
Will thy pinions close now?
Tell me, moon, thou pale and grey. Pilgrim of heaven's homeless way, In what depth of night or day Seekest thou repose now?
Weary wind, who wanderest Like the world's rejected guest, Hast thou still some secret nest On the tree or billow?
THE fiery mountains answer each other; Their thunderings are echoed from zone to zone; The tempestuous oceans awake one another, And the ice-rocks are shaken round winter's throne, When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.
From a single cloud the lightning flashes, Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around; Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,
An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound Is bellowing underground.
But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare, And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp; Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; thy stare Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's bright lamp To thine is a fen-fire damp.
From billow and mountain and exhalation The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast; From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation, From city to hamlet, thy dawning is cast,-
And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night In the van of the morning light.
A PORTAL as of shadowy adamant
Stands yawning on the highway of the life Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt; Around it rages an unceasing strife
Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.
And many passed it by with careless tread, Not knowing that a shadowy [
Tracks every traveller even to where the dead Wait peacefully for their companion new; But others, by more curious humour led,
Pause to examine,-these are very few, And they learn little there, except to know That shadows follow them where'er they go.
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