Which through Albion winds for ever
Lashing with melodious wave

Many a sacred Poet's grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled?

What though thou with all thy dead
Scarce can for this fame repay
Aught thine own? oh, rather say
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul?

As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander's wasting springs;
As divinest Shakespeare's might
Fills Avon and the world with light
Like omniscient power which he
Imaged 'mid mortality ;

As the love from Petrarch's urn,
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,

A quenchless lamp by which the heart
Sees things unearthly;

so thou art,

Mighty spirit so shall be

The City that did refuge thee.

Lo, the sun floats up the sky
Like thought-winged Liberty,
Till the universal light

Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread,
And the beams of morn lie dead
On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
By the skirts of that gray cloud
Many-domèd Padua proud
Stands, a peopled solitude,
'Mid the harvest-shining plain,

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Padua, thou within whose walls
Those mute guests at festivals,
Son and Mother, Death and Sin,
Played at dice for Ezzelin,

Till Death cried, "I win, I win!
And Sin cursed to lose the wager,
But Death promised, to assuage her,
That he would petition for

Her to be made Vice-Emperor,
When the destined years were o'er
Over all between the Po

And the eastern Alpine snow,

Under the mighty Austrian.
Sin smiled so as Sin only can,

And since that time, aye, long before,

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