LXIV. While Waterloo with Canna's carnage vies, Morat and Marathon twin names shall stand; They were true Glory's stainless victories, Won by the unambitious heart and hand Of a proud, brotherly, and civic band, All unbought champions in no princely cause Of vice-entail'd Corruption; they no land Doom'd to bewail the blasphemy of laws Making kings' rights divine, by some Draconic clause. LXV. By a lone wall a lonelier column rears Yet still with consciousness; and there it stands When the coeval pride of human hands, Levell❜d (15) Aventicum, hath strew'd her subject lands. LXVI. And there-oh! sweet and sacred be the name!- Her youth to Heaven; her heart, beneath a claim LXVII. But these are deeds which should not pass away, And names that must not wither, though the earth Forgets her empires with a just decay, The enslavers and the enslaved, their death and birth ; Should be, and shall, survivor of its woe, In the sun's face, like yonder Alpine snow, (17) LXVIII. Lake Leman woos me with its crystal face, Thoughts hid, but not less cherish'd than of old, Ere mingling with the herd had penn'd me in their fold. LXIX. To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind; All are not fit with them to stir and toil, In the hot throng, where we become the spoil We may deplore and struggle with the coil, In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong 'Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong. LXX. There, in a moment, we may plunge our years Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears, To those that walk in darkness: on the sea, Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor'd ne'er shall be. LXXI. Is it not better, then, to be alone, And love Earth only for its earthly sake? Which feeds it as a mother who doth make Kissing its cries away as these awake;- Than join the crushing crowd, doom'd to inflict or bear? LXXII. I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me, Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee, LXXIII. And thus I am absorb'd, and this is life: I look upon the peopled desert past, Where, for some sin, to Sorrow I was cast, cling. |