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.

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.

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.

4. 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,—
And tyrants and slaves are like shadows of night
In the van of the morning light.

THE TOWER OF FAMINE.

AMID the desolation of a city

Which was the cradle and is now the grave Of an extinguished people, so that Pity

Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave,

There stands the Tower of Famine.

It is built

Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave

For bread and gold and blood: Pain linked to Guilt, Agitates the light flame of their hours,

Until its vital oil is spent or spilt.

There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers

And sacred domes, each marble-ribbed roof,
The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers
The tempest-proof

Of solitary wealth.

Pavilions of the dark Italian air

Are by its presence dimmed-they stand aloof,
And are withdrawn-so that the world is bare :-
As if a spectre, wrapped in shapeless terror,
Amid a company of ladies fair

Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror
Of all their beauty, -and their hair and hue,
The life of their sweet eyes with all its error,
Should be absorbed till they to marble grew.

GOOD-NIGHT.

"GOOD-NIGHT?" No, love! the night is il}
Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,—

Then it will be good night.

How were the night without thee good,
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood,-
Then it will be good night.

The hearts that on each other beat
From evening close to morning light
Have nights as good as they are sweet,
But never say "good-night."

TIME LONG PAST.

LIKE the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is time long past.

A tone which is now forever fled,
A hope which is now forever past,
A love so sweet it could not last,
Was time long past.

There were sweet dreams in the night
Of time long past:

And, was it sadness or delight,

Each day a shadow onward cast

Which made us wish it yet might last-
That time long past.

There is regret, almost remorse,

For time long past.

'Tis like a child's beloved corse

A father watches, till at last
Beauty is like remembrance cast
From time long past.

SONNET.

YE hasten to the dead: what seek ye there,
Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes
Of the idle brain, which the world's livery wear?
O thou quick heart, which pantest to possess
All that anticipation feigneth fair—

Thou vainly curious mind which wouldest guess
Whence thou didst come and whither thou mayst go,
And that which never yet was known wouldst know--
Oh! whither hasten ye, that thus ye press

With such swift feet life's green and pleasant path, Seeking alike from happiness and woe

A refuge in the cavern of grey death?

O heart and mind and thoughts! what thing dc
Hope to inherit in the grave below?