EPODE II. α.

Then gentle winds arose,
With many a mingled close

Of wild Æolian sound and mountain odour keen.
And where the Baian 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 sailed where ever flows
Under the calm serene

A spirit of deep emotion

From the unknown graves

Of the dead kings of melody.
Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm
The horizontal ether; heaven stripped bare
Its depths over Elysium, where the prow
Made the invisible water white as snow;
From that Typhæan mount, Inarime,

There streamed a sunlit vapour, like the standard
Of some etherial host;

Whilst from all the coast,

Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered Over the oracular woods and divine sea

Prophesyings which grew articulate

They seize me—I must speak them ;—be they fate!

STROPHE I. α.

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 ruined paradise

Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!
Bright altar of the bloodless sacrifice

Which armed Victory offers up unstained

To Love the flower-enchained!

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

STROPHE II. B.

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 I. 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 Acton'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 II. B.

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 !
STROPHE III. 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
(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)
Art thou of all these hopes.-Oh hail !

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 stripped 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! Oh hail!
EPODE I. B.

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

Of crags and thunder-clouds?

See 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 satiating

They 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!-

Oh 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 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 leopards,
And frowns and fears from thee,

Would not more swifty 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!

25 August 1820.

SUMMER AND WINTER.

It was a bright and cheerful afternoon,
Towards the end of the sunny month of June,
When the north wind congregates in crowds
The floating mountains of the silver clouds
From the horizon, and the stainless sky
Opens beyond them like eternity.

All things rejoiced beneath the sun,-the weeds,
The river, and the cornfields, and the reeds,

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
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes
A wrinkled clod as hard as brick; and when,
Among their children, comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold:
Alas then for the homeless beggar old!

LINES TO A REVIEWER.

ALAS! good friend, what profit can you see
In hating such a hateless thing as me?
There is no sport in hate, where all the rage
Is on one side. In vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,
In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile
Your heart by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh! conquer what you cannot satiate:
For to your passion I am far more coy
Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy

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,
From November to May,

In your saddest array ;
Follow the bier

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;

Put on white, black, and grey;

Let your light sisters play—

Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold Year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

LIBERTY.

1. 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.