Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered
Over the oracular woods and divine sea

Prophesyings which grew articulate

They seize me-I must speak them-be they fate!

STROPHE α. I.

Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven!
Elysian City which to calm enchantest

The mutinous air and sea: they round thee, even
As sleep round Love, are driven !

Metropolis of a ruined Paradise

Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained! Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice,

Which armed Victory offers up unstained

To Love, the flower-enchained!

Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,
Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail,
Hail, hail, all hail!

STROPHE B. 2.

Thou youngest giant birth

Which from the groaning earth

Leap'st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale!

Last, of the Intercessors!

Who 'gainst the Crowned Transgressors

Pleadest before God's love! Arrayed in Wisdom's mail,

Wave thy lightning lance in mirth

Nor let thy high heart fail,

Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors, With hurried legions move!

Hail, hail, all hail!

ANTISTROPHE a.

What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme
Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror
To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam
To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer,

A new Acteon's error

Shall their's have been-devoured by their own hounds!
Be thou like the imperial Basilisk
Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!
Gaze on oppression, till at that dread risk
Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk,
Fear not, but gaze-for freemen mightier grow,
And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe;
If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail,
Thou shalt be great-All hail!

ANTISTROPHE 6. 2.

From Freedom's form divine,

From Nature's inmost shrine,

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. y.

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paan
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Eean*
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy

Starts to hear thine! The Sea

Which paves the desart 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 vipers+ 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. 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,
An athlete stript to run

* Exa, the island of Circe.

The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.

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!

Hear

EPODE I. B.

ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms Arrayed against the everliving Gods?

The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
Bursting their inaccessible abodes

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 aerial 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;

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!

September, 1820.