As I now behold them here, Would imagine not they were Sepulchres, where human forms, Like pollution-nourished worms To the corpse of greatness cling, Murdered, and now mouldering: But if Freedom should awake In her omnipotence, and shake From the Celtic Anarch's hold All the keys of dungeons cold, Where a hundred cities lie Chained like thee, ingloriously, Thou and all thy sister band Might adorn this sunny land, Twining memories of old time With new virtues more sublime; If not, perish thou and they, Clouds which stain truth's rising day By her sun consumed away,
Earth can spare ye: while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring With more kindly blossoming.
One remembrance, more sublime Than the tattered pall of time,
Which scarce hides thy visage wan;
That a tempest-cleaving Swan
Of the songs of Albion,
Driven from his ancestral streams By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean Welcomed him with such emotion
That its joy grew his, and
From his lips like music flung
O'er a mighty thunder-fit
Chastening terror:- what though yet
Poesy's unfailing River,
Which thro' 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;
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
Many-domed Padua proud
Stands, a peopled solitude,
'Mid the harvest shining plain, Where the peasant heaps his grain In the garner of his foe,
And the milk-white oxen slow With the purple vintage strain,
Heaped upon the creaking wain,
That the brutal Celt may swill Drunken sleep with savage will;
And the sickle to the sword
Lies unchanged, though many a lord, Like a weed whose shade is poison, Overgrows this region's foison, Sheaves of whom are ripe to come To destruction's harvest home: Men must reap the things they sow, Force from force must ever flow, Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe That love or reason cannot change The despot's rage, the slave's revenge.
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, Both have ruled from shore to shore, That incestuous pair, who follow Tyrants as the sun the swallow, As Repentance follows Crime, And as changes follow Time.
In thine halls the lamp of learning, Padua, now no more is burning; Like a meteor, whose wild way Is lost over the grave of day, It gleams betrayed and to betray: Once remotest nations came To adore that sacred flame, When it lit not many a hearth On this cold and gloomy earth : Now new fires from antique light Spring beneath the wide world's might; But their spark lies dead in thee, Trampled out by tyranny. As the Norway woodman quells, In the depth of piny dells,
One light flame among the brakes, While the boundless forest shakes,
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