King-deluded Germany,

His dead spirit lives in thee.

Why do we fear or hope? thou art already free!
And thou, lost Paradise of this divine

And glorious world! thou flowery wilderness ! Thou island of eternity! thou shrine

Where desolation clothed with loveliness,

Worships the thing thou wert! O Italy,

Gather thy blood into thy heart; repress

The beasts who make their dens thy sacred palaces.

O, that the free would stamp the impious name
Of King into the dust! or write it there,
So that this blot upon the page of fame

Were as a serpent's path, which the light air
Erases, and the flat sands close behind!
Ye the oracle have heard:

Lift the victory-flashing sword,

And cut the snaky knots of this foul gordian word,
Which weak itself as stubble, yet can bind
Into a mass, irrefragably firm,

The axes and the rods which awe mankind;
The sound has poison in it, 'tis the sperm
Of what makes life foul, cankerous, and abhorred;
Disdain not thou, at thine appointed term,

To set thine armèd heel on this reluctant worm.

O, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle Such lamps within the dome of this dim world, That the pale name of Priest might shrink and dwindle

Into the hell from which it first was hurled,

A scoff of impious pride from fiends impure;

Till human thoughts might kneel alone
Each before the judgment-throne

Of its own aweless soul, or of the power unknown!
O, that the words which make the thoughts obscure
From which they spring, as clouds of glimmer-

ing dew

From a white lake blot heaven's blue portraiture,

Were stript of their thin masks and various hue And frowns and smiles and splendours not their own, Till in the nakedness of false and true

They stand before their Lord, each to receive its due.

He who taught men to vanquish whatsoever
Can be between the cradle and the grave
Crowned him the King of Life. O vain endeavour!
If on his own high will a willing slave,

He has enthroned the oppression and the oppressor.
What if earth can clothe and feed

Amplest millions at their need,

And power in thought be as the tree within the seed? O, what if Art, an ardent intercessor,

Driving on fiery wings to Nature's throne, Checks the great mother stooping to caress her, And cries: Give me, thy child, dominion

Over all height and depth? if Life can breed

New wants, and wealth from those who toil and

groan

Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousand fold for one.

Come Thou, but lead out of the inmost cave

Of man's deep spirit, as the morning-star Beckons the Sun from the Eoan wave,

Wisdom. I hear the pennons of her car

Self-moving, like cloud charioted by flame;
Comes she not, and come ye not,
Rulers of eternal thought,

To judge, with solemn truth, life's ill-apportioned lot? Blind Love, and equal Justice, and the Fame

Of what has been, the Hope of what will be? O, Liberty! if such could be thy name

Wert thou disjoined from these, or they from thee: If thine or theirs were treasures to be bought By blood or tears, have not the wise and free Wept tears, and blood like tears?

harmony

The solemn

Paused, and the spirit of that mighty singing>
To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn ;
Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging
Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,
Sinks headlong through the aërial golden light
On the heavy sounding plain,

When the bolt has pierced its brain;

As summer clouds dissolve, unburthened of their rain;
As a far taper fades with fading night,
As a brief insect dies with dying day,
My song, its pinions disarrayed of might,

Drooped; o'er it closed the echoes far away
Of the great voice which did its flight sustain,
As waves which lately paved his watery way
Hiss round a drowner's head in their tempestuous

play.

F

Poems on Time and its Changes.

OZYMANDIAS.

I MET a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

TIME.

UNFATHOMABLE Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!

Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality!

And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore; Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable Sea?

1821.

THE SEASONS.

THE blasts of Autumn drive the wingèd seeds Over the earth,-next come the snows, and rain, And frosts, and storms, which dreary Winter leads Out of his Scythian cave, a savage train; Behold! Spring sweeps over the world again, Shedding soft dews from her ætherial wings;

Flowers on the mountains, fruits over the plain, And music on the waves and woods she flings, And love on all that lives, and calm on lifeless things.