Be their tomb who planned To make it ours and thine! Or with thine harmonising ardours fill And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon And frowns and fears from thee, Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds. Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine SUMMER AND WINTER. It was a bright and cheerful afternoon, All things rejoiced beneath the sun,—the weeds, The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze, And the firm foliage of the larger trees. It was a Winter such as when birds die LINES TO A REVIEWER. ALAS! good friend, what profit can you see In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile AUTUMN. A DIRGE. THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying And the Year On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead, Is lying. Come, Months, come away, In your saddest array ; Of the dead cold Year, And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre. The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling, 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; Ye, follow the bier Of the dead cold Year, And make her grave green with tear on tear. LIBERTY. I. 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. 2. From a single cloud the lightning flashes, Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around; Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes, An hundred are shuddering and tottering, -the sound Is bellowing underground. 3. 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. 4. 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 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 |