(If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail) Art thou of all these hopes.-Oh hail!

STROPHE IV. d.

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 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! Oh 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;

Au 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. C.

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 dew 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 harmonising 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 swifty flee

Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.

R

Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, oh let be
The City of thy worship ever free!
25th August 1820.

SUMMER AND WINTER.

T was a bright and cheerful afternoon,

Towards the end of the sunny month of June, When the north wind congregates in crowds The floating mountains of the silvery clouds From the horizon, and the stainless sky Opens beyond them like eternity.

All things rejoiced beneath the sun-the weeds, The river, and the cornfields, and the reeds,

The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze, And the firm foliage of the larger trees.

It was a Winter such as when birds die
In the deep forests; and the fishes lie
Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes
Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes
A wrinkled clod as hard as brick; and when,
Among their children, comfortable men
Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold:
Alas then for the homeless beggar old!

LINES TO A REVIEWER.

see

In hating such a hateless thing as me?
There is no sport in hate, where all the rage
Is on one side. In vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,
In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile
Your heart by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh! conquer what you cannot satiate :
For to your passion I am far more coy
Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy

In winter noon. Of your antipathy
If I am the Narcissus, you are free
To pine into a sound with hating me.

TH

AUTUMN.

A DIRGE.

HE 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.

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 grey;

Let your light sisters play-
Ye, follow the bier

Of the dead cold Year,

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

The tempestuous oceans awake one another,

And the ice-rocks are shaken round Winter's throne,

When the clarion of the Typhoon is blown.

2. From a single cloud the lightning flashes,

Whilst a thousand isles are illumined around; Earthquake is trampling one city to ashes,

[sound An hundred are shuddering and tottering the Is bellowing underground.

3. But keener thy gaze than the lightning's glare, And swifter thy step than the earthquake's tramp;