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's1 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 BY

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,

As athlete stript to run
From a remoter station

As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did

avail,

So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!

EPODE II β

Great Spirit, deepest Love!
Which rulest and dost move

For the high prize lost on Philippi's All things which live and are, within the

shore :

Italian shore;

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

1 The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.

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 sati-
ating-

They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary

With fire-from their red feet the streams run gory!

Who spreadest heaven around it, Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it;

EPODE I B

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born
Forms

Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?

From the Earth's bosom chill;

The crash and darkness of a thousand O bid those beams be each a blinding

storms

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

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

I

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 deathbed, 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,

I

And like dim shadows watch by her DEATH is here and death is there,

sepulchre.

Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,

11

The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm Above is death-and we are death. is crawling,

The rivers are swelling, the thunder is

knelling

II

For the year;

Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
The blithe swallows are flown, and the On all we know and all we fear,
lizards each gone

To his dwelling;
Come, months, come away;
Put on white, black, and gray;
Let your light sisters play-

III

First our pleasures die-and then
Our hopes, and then our fears—and when

These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust-and we die too.

IV

All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish,
Such is our rude mortal lot-
Love itself would, did they not.

LIBERTY

I

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.

III

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 city to hamlet thy dawning is cast,

And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night

In the van of the morning light.

IV

From billow and mountain and exhala

tion

SUMMER AND WINTER

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,

II

The willow leaves that glanced in the From a single cloud the lightning flashes, And the firm foliage of the larger trees. light breeze,

Whilst a thousand isles are illumined

The river, and the corn-fields, and the reeds;

around,

It was a winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie

Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,
An hundred are shuddering and totter-Stiffened in the translucent ice, which
ing; the sound

makes

Is bellowing underground.

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!

THE TOWER OF FAMINE
AMID the desolation of a city,
Which was the cradle, and is now the
grave

Of an extinguished people; so that pity

The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's

wave,

From spirit to spirit, from nation to There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built

nation,

Upon some prison homes, whose dwellers

rave

For bread, and gold, and blood: pain,
linked to guilt,

Agitates the light flame of their hours,
Until its vital oil is spent or spilt :

There stands the pile, a tower amid the

towers

Of solitary wealth; the tempest-proof
Pavilions of the dark Italian air,
Are by its presence dimmed-they stand
aloof,

And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed

roof,

The brazen -gated temples, and the And they learn little there, except to

bowers

And are withdrawn-so that the world
is bare,

As if a spectre wrapt in shapeless terror
Amid a company of ladies fair

Should glide and glow, till it became a

mirror

Of all their beauty, and their hair and
hue,
The life of their sweet eyes, with all its

error, Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.

AN ALLEGORY

I

11

And many pass it by with careless tread,

Not knowing that a shadowy .. Tracks every traveller even to where the dead

A PORTAL as of shadowy adamant
Stands yawning on the highway of the

Wait peacefully for their companion

new ;

But others, by more curious humour led Pause to examine,- these are very few,

know

That shadows follow them where'er they go.

THE WORLD'S WANDERERS

I

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?

II

Tell me, moon, thou pale and gray
Pilgrim of heaven's homeless way,
In what depth of night or day
Seekest thou repose now?

III

Weary wind, who wanderest
Like the world's rejected guest,
Hast thou still some secret nest
On the tree or billow?

SONNET

life

Which we all tread, a cavern huge and YE hasten to the grave! What seek ye gaunt; there,

Around it rages an unceasing strife Of shadows, like the restless clouds that

Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes Of the idle brain, which the world's livery wear?

haunt

The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted Oh thou quick heart which pantest to

high

Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.

possess

All that pale expectation feigneth fair!