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
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Ææan
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.- O hail!

ANTISTROPHE B. p.

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,
As 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. 8.

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. ß.

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 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 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!

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,
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.

III.

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.

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,

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