Imatges de pàgina
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Like shadows: as if day had cloven the skies At dreaming midnight o'er the western wave, Men started, staggering with a glad surprise, Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes.

XII.

Thou heaven of earth! whatspells could pall thee then,
In ominous eclipse? A thousand years,
Bred from the slime of deep oppression's den,

Dyed all thy liquid light with blood and tears,
Till thy sweet stars could weep the stain away.
How like Bacchanals of blood

Round France, the ghastly vintage, stood Destruction's sceptred slaves, and folly's mitred brood! When one, like them, but mightier far than they, The Anarch of thine own bewilder'd powers, Rose: armies mingled in obscure array

Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred
bowers

Of serene heaven. He, by the past pursued,
Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours,
Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral

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Tomb of Arminius! render up thy dead,

Till, like a standard from a watch-tower's staff,
His soul may stream over the tyrant's head!
Thy victory shall be his epitaph,
Wild Bacchanal of truth's mysterious wine,
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.

XV.

O, that the free would stamp the impious name
Of **** 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:

Left 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 abhorr'd; Disdain not thou, at thine appointed term, To set thine armed heel on this reluctant worm

XVI.

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 hurl'd, 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 glimmering dew

From a white lake blot heaven's blue portraiture, Were stript of their thin masks and various hue, And frowns and smiles and splendors not their own, Till in the nakedness of false and true They stand before their Lord, each to receive its due.

XVII.

He who taught man to vanquish whatsoever Can be between the cradle and the grave, Crown'd him the King of Life. O vain endeavor!

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
Or what if Art, an ardent intercessor

Diving on fiery wings to Nature's throne, Checks the great mother stooping to caress her, And cries: Give me, thy child, dominion Over all heighth and depth? if Life can breed New wants, and wealth from those who toil and groan Rend of thy gifts and hers a thousandfold for one.

XVIII.

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-apportion'd 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 disjoin'd 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? The solemn harmony

ΧΙΧ.

Paused, and the spirit of that mighty singing To its abyss was suddenly withdrawn;

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Jons at their need, ght be as the tree w

an ardent intercessor

ry wings to Nature at mother stooping a co ive me, thy child ind depth! if Life ealth from those whe ts and hers a thou

XVIIL

ead out of the inmost parit, as the monagar rom the Eoan wave r the pennons of her loud charioted by thame not, and come yea ternal thought emn truth, bes eqrani Justice, and be fit seen, the Hope of what

tch could be thy name

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Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging
Its path athwart the thunder-smoke of dawn,
Sinks headlong through the aerial golden light

On the heavy-sounding plain,

When the bolt has pierced its brain;

From the unknown graves
Of the dead kings of Melody.‡
Shadowy Aornos darken'd o'er the helm
The horizontal ether; heaven stript bare
Is depths over Elysium, where the prow

As summer clouds dissolve, unburthen'd of their rain; Made the invisible water white as snow;

As a far taper fades with fading night,

As a brief insect dies with dying day,

My song, its pinions disarray'd of might,

Droop'd; 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.

ODE TO NAPLES.*

EPODE 1. α.

I STOOD within the city disinterr'd; t

And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls

Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard
The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals
Thrill through those roofless halls;
The oracular thunder penetrating shook

The listening soul in my suspended blood;
I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke-

I felt, but heard not:-through white columns
glow'd

The isle-sustaining Ocean flood,

A plane of light between two Heavens of azure:
Around me gleam'd many a bright sepulchre
Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure
Were to spare Death, had never made erasure ;
But every living lineament was clear
As in the sculptor's thought; and there

The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy and pine,
Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow,
Seem'd only not to move and grow

Because the crystal silence of the air

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Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked beneath the lidless eye of heaven!

Elysian City, which to calm enchantest

The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even
As sleep round Love, are driven!
Metropolis of a ruin'd Paradise

Long lost, late won, and yet but half regain'd!
Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice,

Which armed Victory offers up unstain'd
To Love, the flower-enchain'd!

Thou which wert once, and then did cease to be,
Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail.
Hail, hail, all hail!

STROPHE β. 2.

Thou youngest giant birth
Which from the groaning earth

Leap'st, clothed in armor of impenetrable scale!
Last of the Intercessors!

Who 'gainst the Crown'd Transgressors
Pleadest before God's love! Array'd in Wisdom's mail,
Wave thy lightning lance in mirth;
Nor let thy high heart fail,

Weigh'd on their life; even as the Power divine,
Which then lull'd all things, brooded upon mine. Though from their hundred gates the leagued Op-

EPODE II. a.

Then gentle winds arose,

With many a mingled close

Of wild Æolian sound and mountain odor keen;
And where the Baisen ocean
Welters with air-like motion,

Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,
Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves,
Even as the ever stormless atmosphere
Floats o'er the Elysian realm,

It bore me like an Angel, o'er the waves
Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air

No storm can overwhelm;
I sail'd, where ever flows
Under the calm Serene
A spirit of deep emotion,

• The Author has connected many recollections of his
visit to Pompeii and Baiæ with the enthusiasm excited by
the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional
Government at Naples. This has given a tinge of pic-
turesque and descriptive imagery to the introductory
Epodes which depicture these scenes, and some of the
majestic feelings permanently connected with the scene
of this animating event.-Author's Note.
† Pompeii.

pressors

With hurried legions move!
Hail, hail, all hail!

ANTISTROPHE a.

What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme
Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror
To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam
To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer,

A new Acteon's error

Shall their's have been devour'd by their own

hounds!

Be thou like the imperial Basilisk,
Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!
Gaze on oppression, till at that dread risk
Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk:
Fear not, but gaze-for freemen mightier grow,
And slaves, more feeble, gazing on their foe.
If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail,
Thou shalt be great-All hail!

ANTISTROPHE В 2.

From Freedom's form divine,
From Nature's inmost shrine,

‡ Homer and Virgil.

461

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Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling pean
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Æean*

To the cold Alps, eternal Italy
Starts to hear thine! The Sea

Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs
In light and music; widow'd Genoa wan,

By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,

Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan,
Within whose veins long ran
The viper'st palsying venom, lifts her heel
To bruise his head. The signal and the seal
(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)
Art Thou of all these hopes.-O hail!

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EPODE II. β.

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,
Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command
The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison
From the Earth's bosom chill;
O bid those beams be each a blinding brand
Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!

Bid the Earth's plenty kill!
Bid thy bright Heaven above,
Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who plann'd
To make it ours and thine!

Or, with thine harmonizing ardors 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 leopards,

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, Oh let be
This city of thy worship ever free!

September, 1820.

THE CLOUD.

I BRING fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams;

I bear light shades for the leaves when laid

In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rock'd to rest on their mother's breast,

As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night 'tis my pillow white,

While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits,

In a cavern under is fetter'd the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;
Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,

Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,

With fire-from their red feet the streams run gory!

Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,

* Ææa, the Island of Circe.

† The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, And I all the while bask in heaven's blue smile, tyrants of Milan.

The Spirit he loves remains;

Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

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That orbed maiden, with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, By the midnight breezes strewn ; And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, Which only the angels hear,

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Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

The stars peep behind her and peer;

And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,

Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim,
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,

Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,

The mountains its columns be.

The triumphal arch through which I march

With hurricane, fire, and snow,

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When the powers of the air are chain'd to my chair, To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded now

Is the million-color'd bow;

The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove,

While the moist earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of earth and water,

And the nursling of the sky;

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain, when with never a stain,

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex

gleams,

Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the

tomb,

I arise and unbuild it again.

TO A SKYLARK.

HAIL to thee, blithe spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

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Till the world is wrought

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Teach us, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine

Chorus hymeneal,

Or triumphal chaunt,

Match'd with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of

pain?

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be:

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest

thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,

Poets are on this cold earth,
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth

In a cave beneath the sea.
Where light is, chameleons change;
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised-if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power

A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
O, refuse the boon!

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It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,
Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of BEAUTY! that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom, why man has such a scope

For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given:
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

The world should listen then, as I am listening now. Remain the records of their vain endeavor:

AN EXHORTATION.

CHAMELEONS feed on light and air;
Poets' food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they,
Would they ever change their hue
As the light chameleons do,

Suiting it to every ray
Twenty times a-day?

Frail spells, whose utter'd charm might not avail to

sever,

From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds, depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

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