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. 7. Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling pæan Starts to hear thine! The Sea Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs The viper's palsying venom, lifts her heel ANTISTROPHE B. 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, From a remoter station For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore :- EPODE I. ß. Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms The crash and darkness of a thousand storms 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 Famished wolves that bide no waiting, Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory, On Beauty's corse to sickness satiating They come ! The fields they tread look black and hoary from their red feet the streams run gory! With fire 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, 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, To make it ours and thine ! Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill 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 LIBERTY. I. 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. II. From a single cloud the lightning flashes, An hundred are shuddering and tottering; the sound III. But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare, IV. From billow and mountain and exhalation The sunlight is darted through vapour and blast; From spirit to spirit, from nation to nation, From city to hamlet thy dawning is cast, |