The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even As sleep round Love, are driven! Metropolis of a ruined Paradise Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained! Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice, Which armed Victory offers up unstained Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be, STROPHE B 2 Thou youngest giant birth, Which from the groaning earth Leap'st, clothed in armor of impenetrable scale! Last of the intercessors Who 'gainst the Crowned Transgressors Pleadest before God's love! Arrayed in Wisdom's mail, Wave thy lightning lance in mirth, Nor let thy high heart fail, Though from their hundred gates the leagued With hurried legions move! ANTISTROPHE a 1 What though Cimmerian anarchs dare blaspheme A new Actæon's error 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 8 2 From Freedom's form divine, From Nature's inmost shrine, Strip every impious gaud, 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, Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling pæan 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, The viper's palsying venom, lifts her heel ANTISTROPHE βγ Florence! beneath the sun, Of cities fairest one, Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expectation; From eyes of quenchless hope As ruling once by power, so now by admiration, - From a remoter station For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore : EPODE I B Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms 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 aërial 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 gory! EPODE II B 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; Oh, 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 harmonizing ardors fill And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards, And frowns and fears from Thee, Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shep Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine AUTUMN A DIRGE 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, In your saddest array; Follow the bier Of the dead cold year, And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre. Autumn. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824. |