STROPHE a i

Prophesyings which grew articulate - Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a They seize me- I must speak them—be mirror they fate!

To make their blind slaves see, and with

fierce gleam

To turn his hungry sword upon the Naples! thou Heart of men which ever

wearer; pantest

A new Actæon's error Naked, beneath the lidless eye of Shall theirs have been--devoured by heaven!

their own hounds Elysian City which to calm enchantest Be thou like the imperial Basilisk The mutinous air and sea: they round Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds! thee, even

Gaze on oppression, till at that dread As sleep round Love, are driven !

risk Metropolis of a ruined Paradise

Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk: Long lost, late won, and yet but half Fear not, but gaze—for freemen mightier regained !

grow, Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice, And slaves more feeble, gazing on their Which armèd Victory offers up un

foe; stained

If Hope and Truth and Justice may To Love, the flower-enchained !

avail, Thou which wert once, and then didst Thou shalt be great-All hail !

cease to be, Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be,

ANTISTROPHE B 2 free, If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can

From Freedom's form divine, avail,

From Nature's inmost shrine, Hail, hail, all hail !

Strip every impious gawd, rend Error

veil by veil: STROPHE B 2

O'er Ruin desolate,

O'er Falsehood's fallen state, Thou youngest giant birth

Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Which from the groaning earth

Destroyer pale! Leap'st, clothed in armour of impene.

And equal laws be thine,
trable scale !

And winged words let sail,
Last of the Intercessors !

Freighted with truth even from the
Who 'gainst the Crowned Trans-

throne of God: gressors Pleadest before God's love! Arrayed in

That wealth, surviving fate,

Be thine.-All hail !
Wisdom's mail,
Wave thy lightning lance in mirth
Nor let thy high heart fail,

ANTISTROPHE ay Though from their hundred gates the Didst thou not start to hear Spain's leagued Oppressors,

thrilling paan With hurried legions move! From land to land re-echoed solemnly, Hail, hail, all hail!

Till silence became music? From the

Ævan 1
ANTISTROPHE A

To the cold Alps, eternal Italy What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare Starts to hear thine! The Sea blaspheme

wan

no

Which paves the desert streets of Venice The serene Heaven which wraps our laughs

Eden wide
In light and music; widowed Genoa With iron light is dyed,

The Anarchs of the North lead forth By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,

their legions Murmuring, where is Doria ? fair Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating; Milan,

An hundred tribes nourished on strange Within whose veins long ran

religions The viper'sl palsying venom, lifts her And lawless slaveries,- down the aërial heel

regions To bruise his head. The signal and Of the white Alps, desolating, the seal

Famished wolves that bide (If Hope and Truth and Justice can

waiting, avail)

Blotting the glowing footsteps of old Art Thou of all these hopes. -O hail!

glory,
Trampling our columned cities into dust,

Their dull and savage lust
ANTISTROPHE βγ

On Beauty's corse to sickness sati-
Florence! beneath the sun,

atingOf cities fairest one,

They come! The fields they tread look Blushes within her bower for Freedom's

black and hoary expectation:

With fire- from their red feet the streams From eyes of quenchless hope

run gory!
Rome tears the priestly cope,
As ruling once by power, so now by
admiration,

EPODE IIB
As athlete stript to run

Great Spirit, deepest Love !
From a remoter station

Which rulest and dost move For the high prize lost on Philippi's All things which live and are, within the shore :

Italian shore; As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did

Who spreadest heaven around it, avail,

Whose woods, rocks, waves, surSo now may Fraud and Wrong! O

round it; hail !

Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's

western floor, EPODE I B

Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born The sunbeams and the showers distil Forms

its foison 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

brand Bursting their inaccessible abodes Of lightning ! bid those showers be Of crags and thunder-clouds ?

dews of poison ! See ye the banners blazoned to the day; Bid the Earth's plenty kill! Inwrought with emblems of barbaric Bid thy bright Heaven above, pride ?

Whilst light and darkness bound it, Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,

Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine! 1 The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.

Or, with thine harmonising ardours fill

And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone Ye, follow the bier horizon

Of the dead cold year, Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with And make her grave green with tear on fire

tear. Be man's high hope and unextinct desire, The instrument to work thy will divine !

THE WANING MOON Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,

And like a dying lady, lean and pale, And frowns and fears from Thee, Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil,

Would not more swiftly flee Out of her chamber, led by the insane Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian And feeble wanderings of her fading shepherds.

brain, Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine The moon arose up in the murky east, Thou yieldest or withholdest, Oh, A white and shapeless mass.

let be This city of thy worship ever free!

TO THE MOON

1

I

II

AUTUMN: A DIRGE

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the

earth,
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind Wandering companionless
is wailing,

Among the stars that have a different The bare boughs are sighing, the pale birth,flowers are dying,

And ever changing, like a joyless eye And the year

That finds no object worth its constancy?
On the earth her deathbed, in a shroud
of leaves dead,
Is lying

Thou chosen sister of the spirit,
Come, months, come away,

That gazes on thee till in thee it pities ...
From November to May,
In your saddest array;

DEATH
Follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,
And like dim shadows watch by her Deatil is here and death is there,
sepulchre.

Death is busy everywhere,

All around, within, beneath,
The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm Above is deathand we are death.

is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is
knelling

Death has set his mark and seal
For the year ;

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; First our pleasures die--and then
Let your light sisters play-

Our hopes, and then our fears—and when

IT

II

IV

I

These are dead, the debt is due,

From city to hamlet thy dawning is Dust claims dust-and we die too.

cast, And tyrants and slaves are like shadows

of night All things that we love and cherish,

In the van of the morning light. Like ourselves must fade and perish, Such is our rude mortal lot

SUMMER AND WINTER Love itself would, did they not.

It was a bright and cheersul afternoon, LIBERTY

Towards the end of the sunny month of

June,

When the north wind congregates in The fiery mountains answer each other;

crowds Their thunderings are echoed from The floating mountains of the silver zone to zone;

clouds The tempestuous oceans awake one

From the horizon- and the stainless sky another,

Opens beyond them like eternity. And the ice-rocks are shaken round All things rejoiced beneath the sun; the Winter's throne,

weeds, When the clarion of the Typhoon The river, and the corn-fields, and the is blown.

reeds;

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 around,

It was a winter such as when birds die Earthquake is trampling one city toashes, In the deep forests; and the fishes lie 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 But keener thy gaze than the lightning's when, glare,

Among their children, comfortable men And swifter thy step than the earth-Gather about great fires, and yet feel quake's tramp;

cold : Thou deafenest the rage of the ocean; Alas then for the homeless beggar old !

thy stare Makes blind the volcanoes; the sun's

THE TOWER OF FAMINE bright lamp To thine is a fen-fire damp. Amid the desolation of a city,

Which was the cradle, and is now the

grave From billow and mountain and exhala- of an extinguished people ; so that pity

tion The sunlight is darted through vapour Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's and blast;

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

III

IV

rave

Upon some prison homes, whose dwellers

And many pass it by with careless For bread, and gold, and blood : pain,

tread, linked to guilt,

Not knowing that a shadowy Agitates the light flame of their hours,

Tracks every traveller even to where the Until its vital oil is spent or spilt :

dead

Wait peacefully for their companion There stands the pile, a tower amid the

new ; towers

But others, by more curious humour led And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed

Pause to examine,- these are very roof,

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

know

That shadows follow them where'er they Of solitary wealth; the tempest-proof

go. Pavilions of the dark Italian air, Are by its presence dimmed—they stand THE WORLD'S WANDERERS

aloof,

I

II

III

And are withdrawn -So that the world

Tell me, thou star, whose wings of is bare,

light As if a spectre wrapt in shapeless terror

Speed thee in thy fiery flight, Amid a company of ladies fair

In what cavern of the night Should glide and glow, till it became a Will thy pinions close now?

mirror Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue,

Tell me, moon, thou pale and gray The life of their sweet eyes, with all its Pilgrim of heaven's homeless way, error,

In what depth of night or day Should be absorbed, till they to marble

Seekest thou repose now?
grew.

Weary wind, who wanderest
AN ALLEGORY

Like the world's rejected guest,
Hast thou still some secret nest

On the tree or billow ?
A PORTAL as of shadowy adamant
Stands yawning on the highway of the

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 Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes Of shadows, like the restless clouds that of the idle brain, which the world's haunt

livery wear? The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted Oh thou quick heart which pantest to high

possess Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky. All that pale expectation feigneth fair !