In toil, and many troubles borne in vain
For Florence. I appeal from her to Thee!
Thee, whom I late saw in thy loftiest reign,
Even in that glorious vision, which to see
And live was never granted until now,
And yet thou hast permitted this to me.
Alas! with what a weight upon my brow
The sense of earth and earthly things comes back,
Corrosive passions, feelings dull and low,
The heart's quick throb upon the mental rack,
Long day, and dreary night; the retrospect
Of half a century bloody and black,
And the frail few years I may yet expect
Hoary and hopeless, but less hard to bear;
For I have been too long and deeply wreck'd
On the lone rock of desolate despair
To lift my eyes more to the passing sail
Which shuns that reef so horrible and bare;
Nor raise my voice-for who would heed my wail?
I am not of this people, nor this age;
And yet my harpings will unfold a tale
Which shall preserve these times, when not a page
Of their perturbed annals could attract
An eye to gaze upon their civil rage,
Did not my verse embalm full many an act
Worthless as they who wrought it: 't is the doom
Of spirits of my order to be rack'd
In life, to wear their hearts out, and consume
Their days in endless strife, and die alone;
Then future thousands crowd around their tomb,
And pilgrims come from climes where they have known
The name of him-who now is but a name,
And, wasting homage o'er the sullen stone,
Spread his-by him unheard, unheeded—fame ;
And mine at least hath cost me dear: to die
Is nothing; but to wither thus-to tame
My mind down from its own infinity-
To live in narrow ways with little men,
A common sight to every common eye,
A wanderer, while even wolves can find a den,
Ripp'd from all kindred, from all home, all things
That make communion sweet, and soften pain-
To feel me in the solitude of kings,
Without the power that makes them bear a crown— To envy every dove his nest and wings
Which waft him where the Apennine looks down
On Arno, till he perches, it may be,
Within my all-inexorable town,
Where yet my boys are, and that fatal she, 5
Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought
Destruction for a dowry-this to see
And feel, and know without repair, hath taught
A bitter lesson; but it leaves me free:
I have not vilely found, nor basely sought-
They made an exile-not a slave of me.
THE spirit of the fervent days of old,
When words were things that came to pass, and thought Flash'd o'er the future, bidding men behold Their children's children's doom already brought Forth from the abyss of time which is to be; The chaos of events, where lie half-wrought Shapes that must undergo mortality;
What the great seers of Israel wore within, That spirit was on them, and is on me : And if, Cassandra-like, amidst the din
Of conflict none will hear, or hearing heed, This voice from out the wilderness, the sin Be theirs, and my own feelings be my meed, The only guerdon I have ever known.
Hast thou not bled? and hast thou still to bleed,
Italia? Ah! to me such things, foreshown
With dim sepulchral light, bid me forget
In thine irreparable wrongs my own.
We can have but one country, and even yet
Thou 'rt mine-my bones shall be within thy breast,
My soul within thy language, which once set
With our old Roman sway in the wide west;
But I will make another tongue arise
As lofty and more sweet, in which exprest
The hero's ardour, or the lover's sighs,
Shall find alike such sounds for every theme,
That every word, as brilliant as thy skies,
Shall realise a poet's proudest dream,
And make thee Europe's nightingale of song; So that all present speech to thine shall seem The note of meaner birds, and every tongue
Confess its barbarism when compared with thine. This shalt thou owe to him thou didst so wrong, Thy Tuscan bard, the banish'd Ghibelline.
Woe! woe! the veil of coming centuries
Is rent, a thousand years, which
yet supine
Lie like the ocean waves ere winds arise,
Heaving in dark and sullen undulation,
Float from eternity into these eyes;
The storms yet sleep, the clouds still keep their station,
The unborn earthquake yet is in the womb,
The bloody chaos yet expects creation, But all things are disposing for thy doom; The elements await but for the word,
"Let there be darkness!" and thou grow'st a tomb! Yes! thou, so beautiful, shalt feel the sword,
Thou, Italy! so fair that paradise,
Revived in thee, blooms forth to man restored :
Ah! must the sons of Adam lose it twice?
Thou! Italy! whose ever-golden fields,
Plough'd by the sunbeams solely, would suffice
For the world's granary; thou whose sky heaven gilds
With brighter stars, and robes with deeper blue;
Thou! in whose pleasant places summer builds
Her palace, in whose cradle empire grew,
And form'd the eternal city's ornaments From spoils of kings whom freemen overthrew ; Birth-place of heroes, sanctuary of saints,
Where earthly first, then heavenly glory made
Her home; thou, all which fondest fancy paints,
And finds her prior vision but portray'd
In feeble colours, when the eye-from the Alp
Of horrid show, and rock and shaggy shade
Of desert-loving pine, whose emerald scalp
Nods to the storm-dilates and dotes o'er thee,
And wistfully implores, as 't were, for help
my Italy,
To see thy sunny fields,
Nearer and nearer yet, and dearer still
The more approach'd, and dearest were they free.
Thou-thou must wither to each tyrant's will:
The Goth hath been,-the German, Frank, and Hun, Are yet to come,—and on the imperial hill
Ruin, already proud of the deeds done
By the old barbarians, there awaits the new,
Throned on the Palatine, while, lost and won,
Rome at her feet lies bleeding; and the hue
Of human sacrifice and Roman slaughter
Troubles the clotted air, of late so blue,
And deepens into red the saffron water
Of Tiber, thick with dead; the helpless priest,
And still more helpless nor less holy daughter,
Vow'd to their god, have shrieking fled, and ceased.
Their ministry: the nations take their prey,
Iberian, Almain, Lombard, and the beast
And bird, wolf, vulture, more humane than they
Are; these but gorge the flesh and lap the gore
Of the departed, and then go their way;
But those, the human savages, explore
All paths of torture, and insatiate yet
With Ugolino hunger prowl for more.
Nine moons shall rise o'er scenes like this and set;
The chiefless army of the dead, which late
Beneath the traitor prince's banner met,
Hath left its leader's ashes at the gate;
Had but the royal rebel lived, perchance
Thou hadst been spared, but his involved thy fate.
Oh! Rome, the spoiler of the spoil of France,
From Brennus to the Bourbon, never, never
Shall foreign standard to thy walls advance,
But Tiber shall become a mournful river.
Oh! when the strangers pass the Alps and Po,
Crush them, ye rocks! floods, whelm them, and for ever!
Why sleep the idle avalanches so,
To topple on the lonely pilgrim's head?
Why doth Eridanus but overflow
The peasant's harvest from his turbid bed?
Were not each barbarous horde a nobler prey?
Over Cambyses' host the desert spread
Her sandy ocean, and the sea-waves' sway
Roll'd over Pharaoh and his thousands,-why,
Mountains and waters, do ye not as they?
And you, ye men! Romans, who dare not die,
Sons of the conquerors who overthrew
Those who o'erthrew proud Xerxes, where yet lie
The dead whose tomb oblivion never knew,
Are the Alps weaker than Thermopyla?
Their passes more alluring to the view
Of an invader? is it they, or ye
That to each host the mountain-gate unbar,
And leave the march in
peace, the
passage free?
Why, Nature's self detains the victor's car,
And makes your land impregnable, if earth
Could be so but alone she will not war,
Yet aids the warrior worthy of his birth,
In a soil where the mothers bring forth men!
Not so with those whose souls are little worth;
For them no fortress can avail,-the den
Of the poor reptile which preserves its sting
Is more secure than walls of adamant, when
The hearts of those within are quivering.
Are
ye not brave? Yes, yet the Ausonian soil
Hath hearts, and hands, and arms, and hosts to bring
Against oppression; but how vain the toil,
While still division sows the seeds of woe
And weakness, till the stranger reaps the spoil.
Oh! my own beauteous land! so long laid low,
So long the grave of thy own children's hopes,
When there is but required a single blow
To break the chain, yet—yet the avenger stops,
And doubt and discord step 'twixt thine and thee,
And join their strength to that which with thee copes :
What is there wanting then to set thee free,
And show thy beauty in its fullest light?
To make the Alps impassable; and we,
Her sons, may do this with one deed-Unite!
FROM out the mass of never-dying ill,
The plague, the prince, the stranger, and the sword, Vials of wrath but emptied to refill
And flow again, I cannot all record
That crowds on my prophetic eye: the earth
And ocean written o'er would not afford
Space for the annal; yet it shall go forth;
Yes, all, though not by human pen,
There where the farthest suns and stars have birth,
Spread like a banner at the gate of heaven,
The bloody scroll of our millennial wrongs
Waves, and the echo of our groans is driven
Athwart the sound of archangelic songs,
And Italy, the martyr'd nation's gore,
Will not in vain arise to where belongs
Omnipotence and mercy evermore :
Like to a harp-string stricken by the wind,
The sound of her lament shall, rising o'er
The seraph voices, touch the Almighty Mind.
Meantime I, humblest of thy sons, and of
Earth's dust by immortality refined
To sense and suffering, though the vain may scoff,
And tyrants threat, and meeker victims bow
Before the storm because its breath is rough,
To thee, my country! whom before, as now,
I loved and love, devote the mournful lyre
And melancholy gift high powers allow
To read the future; and if now my fire
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