Over the oracular woods and divine sea 50 They seize me-I must speak them—be they fate! STROPHE a. 1. Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven! Elysian City which to calm enchantest 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 60 To Love, the flower-enchained! Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be, Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free, If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail, Hail, hail, all hail! STROPHE B. 2. Thou youngest giant birth Leap'st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale! Last of the Intercessors! Who'gainst the Crowned Transgressors Pleadest before God's love! dom's mail, 69 Arrayed in Wis Wave thy lightning lance in mirth, Nor let thy high heart fail, Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors, With hurried legions move! ANTISTROPHE a. What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer; 80 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 6. 2. From Freedom's form divine, 90 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 That wealth, surviving fate, 100 ANTISTROPHE a. y. Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling pæan From land to land re-echoed solemnly, Till silence became music? From the Exan To the cold Alps, eternal Italy 1 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, 110 Within whose veins long ran 2 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 ß. y. Florence! beneath the sun, Of cities fairest one, Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expectation: From eyes of quenchless hope 120 As ruling once by power, so now by admiration, As athlete stripped to run From a remoter station 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. B. Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms Arrayed against the ever-living Gods? 1 Eæa, the island of Circe. 2 The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan. The crash and darkness of a thousand storms Bursting their inaccessible abodes See Of crags and thunder-clouds? 130 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 re ligions And lawless slaveries,-down the aërial regions Of the white Alps, desolating, 141 Famished wolves that bide no waiting, Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory, 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! EPODE II. ß. Great Spirit, deepest Love! 150 All things which live and are, within the Italian shore; Who spreadest heaven around it, round it, sur 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! 160 Bid the Earth's plenty kill! To make it ours and thine! Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill And frowns and fears from Thee, 170 Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds. Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine LIBERTY. I. THE fiery mountains answer each other; 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. |