Now, though towering like a Babel,
Who to stop his steps are able?
Stalking o'er thy highest dome,
Remus claims his vengeance, Rome!

Now they reach thee in their anger;
Fire and smoke and hellish clangor
Are around thee, thou world's wonder!
Death is in thy walls and under.
Now the meeting steel first clashes,
Downward then the ladder crashes,
With its iron load all gleaming,
Lying at its foot blaspheming.
Up again! for every warrior

Slain, another climbs the barrier.

Thicker grows the strife; thy ditches
Europe's mingling gore enriches.
Rome! although thy wall may perish,
Such manure thy fields will cherish,
Making gay the harvest-home;

But thy hearths! alas, O Rome! -
Yet be Rome amidst thine anguish,
Fight as thou wast wont to vanquish!

Yet once more, ye old Penates,

Let not your quenched hearths be Atè's! Yet again, ye shadowy heroes,

Yield not to these stranger Neros!

Though the son who slew his mother

Shed Rome's blood, he was your brother: 'Twas the Roman curbed the Roman;

Brennus was a baffled foeman.

Yet again, ye saints and martyrs,
Rise! for yours are holier charters!

Mighty gods of temples falling,

Yet in ruin still appalling,

Mightier founders of those altars

True and Christian -strike the assaulters!

Tiber! Tiber! let thy torrent

Show even nature's self abhorrent.

Let each breathing heart dilated

Turn, as doth the lion baited:

Rome be crushed to one wide tomb,

But be still the Roman's Rome!

VENICE

I

STOOD in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand;

I saw from out the wave her structures rise

As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying glory smiles

O'er the far times when many a subject land Looked to the wingèd Lion's marble piles,

Where Venice sat in state, throned on her hundred isles!

She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,

Rising with her tiara of proud towers

At airy distance, vith majestic motion,

A ruler of the waters and their powers:

And such she was; her daughters had their dowers From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East

Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers. In purple was she robed, and of her feast Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity increased.

In Venice, Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,

And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone - but Beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade-but Nature doth not die,

Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!

But unto us she hath a spell beyond

Her name in story, and her long array
Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond
Above the Dogeless city's vanished sway:
Ours is a trophy which will not decay

With the Rialto; Shylock and the Moor,

And Pierre, cannot be swept or worn away -
The keystones of the arch! though all were o'er,

For us repeopled were the solitary shore.

The beings of the mind are not of clay;

Essentially immortal, they create

And multiply in us a brighter ray

And more beloved existence: that which Fate
Prohibits to dull life, in this our state

Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied,

First exiles, then replaces what we hate; Watering the heart whose early flowers have died, And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.

O

ODE TO VENICE

I

VENICE! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be
A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,

A loud lament along the sweeping sea!

If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee,

What should thy sons do?- anything but weep: And yet they only murmur in their sleep. In contrast with their fathers- as the slime, The dull green ooze of the receding deep, Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam That drives the sailor shipless to his home

Are they to those that were; and thus they creep, Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping streets. Oh, agony! that centuries should reap

No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years
Of wealth and glory turned to dust and tears;
And every monument the stranger meets,
Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets;
And even the Lion all subdued appears,

And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum,
With dull and daily dissonance, repeats

The echo of thy tyrant's voice along

The soft waves, once all musical to song,

That heaved beneath the moonlight with the throng

Of gondolas - and to the busy hum

Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds
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
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 unsoftened 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,
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 chain;
And then he talks of life, and how again
He feels his spirit soaring- albeit weak,
And of the fresher air, which he would seek:
And as he whispers knows not that he gasps,
That his thin finger feels not what it clasps,
And so the film comes o'er him- and the dizzy
Chamber swims round and round—and shadows busy,
At which he vainly catches, flit and gleam,

Till the last rattle chokes the strangled scream,

And all is ice and blackness-and the earth
That which it was the moment ere our birth.

II

There is no hope for nations!- Search the page
Of many thousand years—the daily scene,

The flow and ebb of each recurring age,

The everlasting to be which hath been,

Hath taught us naught, or little: still we lean
On things that rot beneath our weight, and wear
Our strength away in wrestling with the air:
For 'tis our nature strikes us down; the beasts
Slaughtered 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 blows.
What! do not yet the red-hot plowshares burn,
O'er which you stumble in a false ordeal,
And deem this proof of loyalty the real;
Kissing the hand that guides you to your scars,
And glorying as you tread the glowing bars?

All that your sires have left you, all that Time
Bequeaths of free, and History of sublime,
Spring from a different theme! Ye see and read,
Admire and sigh, and then succumb and bleed!
Save the few spirits who, despite of all,
And worse than all-the sudden crimes engendered
By the down-thundering of the prison-wall,
And thirst to swallow the sweet waters tendered
Gushing from Freedom's fountains, when the crowd,
Maddened with centuries of drought, are loud,

And trample on each other to obtain

The cup which brings oblivion of a chain Heavy and sore, in which long yoked they plowed The sand; or if there sprung the yellow grain, 'Twas not for them, their necks were too much bowed, And their dead palates chewed the cud of pain;Yes! the few spirits who, despite of deeds Which they abhor, confound not with the cause Those momentary starts from Nature's laws Which, like the pestilence and earthquake, smite But for a term, then pass, and leave the earth With all her seasons to repair the blight

With a few summers, and again put forth
Cities and generations — fair when free —
For, Tyranny, there blooms no bud for thee!

HI

Glory and Empire! once upon these towers

With Freedom-godlike Triad! - how ye sate!
The league of mightiest nations in those hours
When Venice was an envy, might abate,
But did not quench her spirit; in her fate
All were enwrapped: the feasted monarchs knew
And loved their hostess, nor could learn to hate,
Although they humbled. With the kingly few
The many felt, for from all days and climes
She was the voyager's worship; even her crimes
Were of the softer order-born of Love.
She drank no blood, nor fattened on the dead,
But gladdened where her harmless conquests spread;
For these restored the Cross, that from above
Hallowed her sheltering banners, which incessant
Flew between earth and the unholy Crescent,
Which if it waned and dwindled, Earth may thank
The city it has clothed in chains, which clank