Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine!

Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill
And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon
Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire!
Be man's high hope and unextinct desire
The instrument to work thy will divine!
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leo-
pards,

And frowns and fears from Thee,
Would not more swiftly flee,

Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.

Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, O let be
This City of thy worship, ever free!

AUTUMN;

A DIRGE.

THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wail

ing,

[dying;

The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are

And the year

On the earth, her death-bed, 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,

And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawl

ing,

The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling For the year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each

gone

To his dwelling;

Come, months, come away;
Put on white, black, and gray;
Let your light sisters play-
Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

DEATH.

DEATH is here, and death is there,

Death is busy everywhere,

All around, within, beneath,

Above, is death-and we are death.

Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,

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.

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.

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.

From a single cloud the lightning flashes,
Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around;
Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,
A hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound
Is bellowing underground.

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 billow and mountain and exhalation
The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast;
From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation,
From city to hamlet, thy dawning is cast,-
And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night
In the van of the morning light.

THE WORLD'S WANDERERS.

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?

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

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

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.
Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave,
There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built

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
And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed roof,
The brazen-gated temples and the bowers
Of solitary wealth, the tempest-proof
Pavilions of the dark Italian air,

Are by its presence dimmed-they stand aloof,
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.

At Pisa there still exists the prison of Ugolino, which goes by the name of "La Torre della Fame:" in the adjoining building the galley-slaves are confined. It is situated near the Ponte al Mare on the Arno.

« AnteriorContinuar »