If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail, ANTISTROPHE B. 2. From Freedom's form divine, From Nature's inmost shrine, Strip every impious gawd, rend Error veil by veil : O'er Falsehood's fallen state Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale ! And winged words let sail, Freighted with truth even from the throne of God: Be thine. All hail! ANTISTROPHE c. y. Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paan Starts to hear thine! The Sea Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs The viper's + palsying venom, lifts her heel * Exa, the island of Circe. The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan, ANTISTROPHE S. y. 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, From a remoter station For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore :- EPODE I. B. Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms See Of crags and thunder-clouds? ye the banners blazon'd to the day, Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride? The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions Famish'd wolves that bide no waiting, 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. B. Great Spirit, deepest Love! Which rulest and dost move All things which live and are, within the Italian shore; Who spreadest heaven around it,' Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it; Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's western floor, O bid those beams be each a blinding brand Bid thy bright Heaven above, Whilst light and darkness bound it, To make it ours and thine ! Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards, Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds. - ON THE MEDUSA OF LEONARDO DA VINCI, IN THE FLORENTINE GALLERY. T lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine; Yet it is less the horror than the grace Are graven, till the characters be grown And from its head as from one body grow, Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock And from a stone beside a poisonous eft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. 'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks. Florence, 1819. R SONG. |ARELY, rarely, comest thou, Wherefore hast thou left me now Many a weary night and day How shall ever one like me All but those who need thee not. As a lizard with the shade Of a trembling leaf, Thou with sorrow art dismay'd; Even the sighs of grief Reproach thee, that thou art not near, And reproach thou wilt not hear. |