Or to some toppling promontory proud Of solid tempest, whose black pyramid, Riven, overhangs the founts intensely brightning Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire Before their waves expire, When heaven and earth are light, and only light In the thunder-night! VOICE (without) Victory, victory! Austria, Russia, England, And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France, Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak. Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes! These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poi soners Than Greeks. remain. Kill, plunder, burn! let none SEMICHORUS I Alas for Liberty! If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years, Alas for Virtue! when Torments, or contumely, or the sneers Of erring judging men Can break the heart where it abides! Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid, Can change, with its false times and tides, Alas for Love! And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended, If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror SEMICHORUS II Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn, Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn Through many an hostile Anarchy ! At length they wept aloud and cried, "the sea! the sea!" Through exile, persecution, and despair, Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become, Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair. But Greece was as a hermit child, Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built To woman's growth by dreams so mild She knew not pain or guilt; And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble, When ye desert the free! If Greece must be A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble, To Amphionic music, on some Cape sublime, SEMICHORUS I Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made; Let the free possess the paradise they claim; Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed With our ruin, our resistance, and our name! SEMICHORUS II Our dead shall be the seed of their decay, VOICE (without) Victory! Victory! the bought Briton sends The keys of ocean to the Islamite. Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled, And British skill, directing Othman might, Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh, keep holy This jubilee of unrevengèd blood! Kill, crush, despoil! Let not a Greek escape! SEMICHORUS I Darkness has dawned in the East On the noon of time; The death birds descend to their feast, Let Freedom and Peace flee far To a sunnier strand, And follow Love's folding star To the Evening land! The weak day is dead, But the night is not born; And, like loveliness panting with wild desire, While it trembles with fear and delight, Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free! To climes where now, veiled by the ardor of day, Thou art hidden From waves on which weary Noon Faints in her summer swoon, Between kingless continents, sinless as Eden, Around mountains and islands inviolably SEMICHORUS I Through the sunset of hope, What Paradise islands of glory gleam! Their shadows more clear float by; The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky, The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe, Burst like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death, Through the walls of our prison; And Greece, which was dead, is arisen! CHORUS The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls his fountains Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep A loftier Argo cleaves the main, And loves, and weeps, and dies. Oh, write no more the tale of Troy, Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendor of its prime; And leave, if nought so bright may live, |