Their bones in the grave will start and move,
When they hear the voices of those they love,
Most loud in the holy combat above.

Wave, wave high the banner!

When Freedom is riding to conquest by:
Though the slaves that fan her

Be famine and toil, giving sigh for sigh.
And ye who attend her imperial car,
Lift not your hands in the banded war,
But in her defence whose children ye are.

Glory, glory, glory,

To those who have greatly suffered and done! Never name in story

Was greater than that which ye shall have won. Conquerors have conquered their foes alone, Whose revenge, pride, and power, they have overthrown:

Ride ye, more victorious, over your own.

Bind, bind every brow

With crownals of violet, ivy, and pine:

Hide the blood-stains now

With hues which sweet nature has made divine,Green strength, azure hope, and eternity. But let not the pansy among them be;

Ye were injured, and that means memory.

ODE TO HEAVEN.

CHORUS OF SPIRITS.

FIRST SPIRIT.

PALACE-ROOF of cloudless nights!
Paradise of golden lights!

Deep, immeasurable, vast,

Which art now and which wert then
Of the present and the past,
Of the eternal where and when,
Presence-chamber, temple, home;
Ever-canopying dome,

Of acts and ages yet to come!

Glorious shapes have life in thee,
Earth, and all earth's company;

Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;
And green worlds that glide along;
And swift stars with flashing tresses;
And icy moons most cold and bright,
And mighty suns beyond the night,
Atoms of intensest light.

Even thy name is as a god,

Heaven! for thou art the abode

Of that power which is the glass
Wherein man his nature sees.
Generations as they pass
Worship thee with bended knees.
Their unremaining gods and they
Like a river roll away ;

Thou remainest such alway.

SECOND SPIRIT.

Thou art but the mind's first chamber,
Round which its young fancies clamber,
Like weak insects in a cave,

Lighted up by stalactites;

But the portal of the grave, Where a world of new delights Will make thy best glories seem But a dim and noonday gleam From the shadow of a dream!

THIRD SPIRIT.

Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn At your presumption, atom-born!

What is heaven? and what are ye

Who its brief expanse inherit?

What are suns and spheres which flee

With the instinct of that spirit

Of which ye are but a part?

Drops which Nature's mighty heart

Drives through thinnest veins. Depart!

What is heaven? a globe of dew,

Filling in the morning new

Some eyed flower, whose young leaves waken On an unimagined world:

Constellated suns unshaken,
Orbits measureless, are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.

ODE TO THE WEST WIND.*

1.

O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

* This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood taat skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset, with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.

The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently fluenced by the winds which announce it.

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!

11.

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's
commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and
Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height.

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge