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STROPHE B. 2.

Thou youngest giant birth,

Which from the groaning earth

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

Who 'gainst the Crowned Transgressors Pleadest before God's love! Arrayed in Wisdom's mail,

Wave thy lightning lance in mirth;

Nor let thy high heart fail,

Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors,

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

ANTISTROPHE α.

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 Actæon's error

Shall theirs have been-devoured 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 ẞ. 2.

From Freedom's form divine,

From Nature's inmost shrine,

Strip every impious gawd, rend Error veil by

veil :

O'er Ruin desolate,

O'er Falsehood's fallen state,

Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale! And equal laws be thine,

And winged words let sail,

Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:

'That wealth, surviving fate, be thine.-All hail!

ANTISTROPHE α. y.

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paan
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Exan
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy

Starts to hear thine! The Sea

*

Which paves the desert streets of Venice, laughs
In light and music; widowed Genoa wan,
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,
Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan,
Within whose veins long ran

The viper's† palsying venom, lifts her heel
To bruise his head. The signal and the seal

* Eæa, the Island of Circe.

†The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.

(If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail) Art thou of all these hopes.-O hail!

ANTISTROPHE ẞ. 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,— An athlete stript to run

From a remoter station

For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore :As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail, So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!

EPODE I. 6.

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms
Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?

The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
Bursting their inaccessible abodes

See

Of crags and thunder-clouds ?

ye the banners blazoned to the day, Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride? Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,

The Serene Heaven which wraps our Eden

wide

With iron light is dyed,

The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions

Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating;

An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions And lawless slaveries,-down the aërial regions Of the white Alps, desolating,

Famished wolves that bide no waiting, Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory, Trampling our columned cities into dust, Their dull and savage lust

On Beauty's corse to sickness satiatingThey 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, 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 poi-

son!

Bid the Earth's plenty kill!
Bid thy bright Heaven above,

Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine!

Or, with thine harmonizing ardours 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 leo-
pards,

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 !

AUTUMN:

A DIRGE.

THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wail

ing,

[dying,

The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are

And the year

On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves

dead,

Is lying,

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