Were but the overbeating of the heart, And flow of too much happiness, which needs

The aid of age to turn its course apart From the luxuriant and voluptuous flood 30 Of sweet sensations, battling with the blood. But these are better than the gloomy errors, The weeds of nations in their last decay, When Vice walks forth with her unsoften'd terrors,

And Mirth is madness, and but smiles to slay;

And Hope is nothing but a false delay, The sick man's lightning half an hour ere death,

When Faintness, the last mortal birth of Pain,

And apathy of limb, the dull beginning Of the cold staggering race which Death is winning,

40

Steals vein by vein and pulse by pulse away;
Yet so relieving the o'er-tortured clay,
To him appears renewal of his breath,
And freedom the mere numbness of his

Our strength away in wrestling with the air;

For 't is our nature strikes us down: the beasts

Slaughter'd in hourly hecatombs for feasts Are of as high an order - they must go Even where their driver goads them, though

to slaughter.

Ye men, who pour your blood for kings as water,

What have they given your children in return?

A heritage of servitude and woes,

A blindfold bondage, where your hire is

Admire and sigh, and then succumb and bleed !

Save the few spirits, who, despite of all, 80 And worse than all, the sudden crimes engender'd

LADY! if for the cold and cloudy clime Where I was born, but where I would not die,

Of the great Poet-Sire of Italy I dare to build the imitative rhyme, Harsh Runic copy of the South's sublime,

THOU art the cause; and howsoever I Fall short of his immortal harmony, Thy gentle heart will pardon me the crime. Thou, in the pride of Beauty and of Youth, Spakest; and for thee to speak and be obey'd

Are one; but only in the South sunny Such sounds are utter'd, and such charms display'd,

So sweet a language from so fair a mouth Ah! to what effort would it not persuade ?

of interest in that city, both to the native and to the stranger.

'On this hint I spake,' and the result has been the following four cantos, in terza rima, now offered to the reader. If they are understood and approved, it is my purpose to continue the poem in various other cantos to its natural conclusion in the present age. The reader is requested to suppose that Dante addresses him in the interval between the conclusion of the Divina Commedia and his death, and shortly before the latter event, foretelling the fortunes of Italy in general in the ensuing centuries. In adopting this plan I have had in my mind the Cassandra of Lycophron, and the Prophecy of Nereus by Horace, as well as the Prophecies of Holy Writ. The measure adopted is the terza rima of Dante, which I am not aware to have seen hitherto tried in our language, except it may be by Mr. Hayley, of whose translation I never saw but one extract, quoted in the notes to Caliph Vathek; so that - if I do not err this poem may be considered as a metrical experiment. The cantos are short, and about the same length of those of the poet, whose name I have borrowed, and most probably taken in vain.

Amongst the inconveniences of authors in the present day, it is difficult for any who have a name, good or bad, to escape translation. I have had the fortune to see the fourth canto of Childe Harold translated into Italian versi sciolti, that is, a poem written in the Spenserean stanza into blank verse, without regard to the natural divisions of the stanza or of the sense. If the present poem, being on a national topic, should chance to undergo the same fate, I would request the Italian reader to remember that when I have failed in the imitation of his great 'Padre Alighier,' I have failed in imitating that which all study and few understand, since to this very day it is not yet settled what was the meaning of the allegory in the first canto of the Inferno, unless Count Marchetti's ingenious and probable conjecture may be considered as having decided the question.

He may also pardon my failure the more, as I am not quite sure that he would be pleased with my success, since the Italians, with a pardonable nationality, are particularly jealous of all that is left them as a nation - their literature; and in the present bitterness of the classic and romantic war, are but ill-disposed to permit a foreigner even to approve or imitate them, without finding some fault with his ultramontane presumption. I can easily enter into all this, knowing what would be thought in England of an Italian imitator of Milton, or if a translation of Monti, or Pindemonte, or Arici, should be held up to the rising generation as a model for their future poetical essays.