If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror
Before the dazzled eyes of Error,
Alas for thee! Image of the Above!

SEMICHORUS II

Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn, Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn Through many an hostile Anarchy !

At length they wept aloud and cried, "the sea! "" the sea!

Through exile, persecution, and despair,

Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become,
The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb,

Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair.

But Greece was as a hermit child,

Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built To woman's growth by dreams so mild. She knew not pain or guilt;

And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble, When ye desert the free!

If Greece must be

A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime,

To Amphionic music, on some Cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of time.

SEMICHORUS I

Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made; Let the free possess the paradise they claim; Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed With our ruin, our resistance, and our name!

SEMICHORUS II

Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,
Our survivors be the shadows of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away,—
Their dishonor a remembrance to abide !

VOICE (without)

Victory! Victory! the bought Briton sends The keys of ocean to the Islamite.

Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled, And British skill, directing Othman might, Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh, keep holy This jubilee of unrevenged blood!

Kill, crush, despoil! Let not a Greek escape!

SEMICHORUS I

Darkness has dawned in the East

On the noon of time;

The death birds descend to their feast,
From the hungry clime.

Let Freedom and Peace flee far

To a sunnier strand,

And follow Love's folding star

To the Evening land!

SEMICHORUS II

The young moon has fed

Her exhausted horn

With the sunset's fire;

The weak day is dead,

But the night is not born;

And, like loveliness panting with wild desire,

While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night,
And pants in its beauty and speed with light
Fast-flashing, soft and bright.

Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!
Guide us far, far away,

To climes where now, veiled by the ardor of day,

Thou art hidden

From waves on which weary Noon

Faints in her summer swoon,

Between kingless continents, sinless as Eden,
Around mountains and islands inviolably

Pranked on the sapphire sea.

SEMICHORUS I

Through the sunset of hope,
Like the shapes of a dream,

What Paradise islands of glory gleam!
Beneath Heaven's cope,

Their shadows more clear float by;

The sound of their oceans, the light of their

sky,

The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe, Burst like morning on dream, or like Heaven on

death,

Through the walls of our prison;

And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!

CHORUS

The world's great age begins anew,

The golden years return,

The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn ;

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains

From waves serener far;

A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning-star.

Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,

And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.

Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,

If earth Death's scroll must be! Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free; Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time

Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,

The splendor of its prime;

And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.

Saturn and Love their long repose

Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued;

Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers.

Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.

The world is weary of the past,

Oh, might it die or rest at last!

1091-93 more bright... unsubdued, Shelley n. d. || omit, Shelley, 1822; bright || wise, Galignani, 1829; unsubdued || unwithstood, Galignani, 1829.