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 BY

Florence! beneath the sun,

Of cities fairest one,

Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expec

tation;

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! O 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 в

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 ardors 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 shep

herds.

Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, oh, let be
This city of thy worship, ever free!

AUTUMN;

A DIRGE

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.

Autumn. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824.

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 gray;

Let your light sisters play
Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

DEATH

I

DEATH is here, and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,

All around, within, beneath,

Above, is death- and we are death.

II

Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,

III

First our pleasures die—and then
Our hopes, and then our fears-and when

Death. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824.

These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust-and we die too.

IV

All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves, must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot -

Love itself would, did they not.

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.

Liberty. Published by Mrs. Shelley, 1824.