IV.

The nodding promontories, and blue isles,

And cloud-like mountains, and dividuous waves
Of Greece, basked glorious in the open smiles
Of favouring heaven: from their enchanted caves
Prophetic echoes flung dim melody.

On the unapprehensive wild

The vine, the corn, the olive mild,

Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled;
And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea,

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Like the man's thought dark in the infant's brain,

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Like aught that is which wraps what is to be,

Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein

Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child,

Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain

Her lidless eyes for thee; when o'er the Ægean main 60

V.

Athens arose: a city such as vision

Builds from the purple crags and silver towers

Of battlemented cloud, as in derision

Of kingliest masonry: the ocean-floors

Pave it; the evening sky pavilions it;

Its portals are inhabited

By thunder-zonèd winds, each head

Within its cloudy wings with sunfire garlanded,
A divine work! Athens diviner yet

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Gleamed with its crest of columns, on the will

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Of man, as on a mount of diamond, set;

For thou wert, and thine all-creative skill

Peopled with forms that mock the eternal dead

In marble immortality, that hill

Which was thine earliest throne and latest oracle.

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VI.

Within the surface of Time's fleeting river
Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay
Immovably unquiet, and for ever

It trembles, but it cannot pass away!
The voices of thy bards and sages thunder

With an earth-awakening blast

Through the caverns of the past;

Religion veils her eyes; Oppression shrinks aghast:
A winged sound of joy, and love, and wonder,
Which soars where Expectation never flew,
Rending the veil of space and time asunder!

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One ocean feeds the clouds, and streams, and dew;

One sun illumines heaven; one spirit vast

With life and love makes chaos ever new,

As Athens doth the world with thy delight renew.

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VII.

Then Rome was, and from thy deep bosom fairest,
Like a wolf-cub from a Cadmæan Mænad,
She drew the milk of greatness, though thy dearest
From that Elysian food was yet unweaned;
And many a deed of terrible uprightness

By thy sweet love was sanctified;

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And in thy smile, and by thy side,

Saintly Camillus lived, and firm Atilius died.

But when tears stained thy robe of vestal whiteness,
And gold profaned thy capitolian throne,

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Thou didst desert, with spirit-winged lightness,
The senate of the tyrants: they sunk prone

Slaves of one tyrant : Palatinus sighed
Faint echoes of Ionian song; that tone

Thou didst delay to hear, lamenting to disown.

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VIII.

From what Hyrcanian glen or frozen hill,
Or piny promontory of the Arctic main,
Or utmost islet inaccessible,

Didst thou lament the ruin of thy reign,
Teaching the woods, and waves, and desert rocks,
And every Naiad's ice-cold urn,

To talk in echoes sad and stern,

Of that sublimest lore which man had dared unlearn?
For neither didst thou watch the wizard flocks

ΓΙΟ

Of the Scald's dreams, nor haunt the Druid's sleep. 115 What if the tears rained through thy shattered locks

Were quickly dried? for thou didst groan, not weep

When from its sea of death to kill and burn,

The Galilean serpent forth did creep,

And made thy world an undistinguishable heap.

I 20

IX.

A thousand years the Earth cried, Where art thou?
And then the shadow of thy coming fell
On Saxon Alfred's olive-cinctured brow:
And many a warrior-peopled citadel,

Like rocks which fire lifts out of the flat deep,
Arose in sacred Italy,

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Frowning o'er the tempestuous sea

Of kings, and priests, and slaves, in tower-crowned majesty; That multitudinous anarchy did sweep,

And burst around their walls, like idle foam, Whilst from the human spirit's deepest deep

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Strange melody with love and awe struck dumb

Dissonant arms; and Art, which cannot die,
With divine wand traced on our earthly home

Fit imagery to pave heaven's everlasting dome.

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X.

Thou huntress swifter than the Moon! thou terror
Of the world's wolves! thou bearer of the quiver,
Whose sunlike shafts pierce tempest-wingèd Error,
As light may pierce the clouds when they dissever
In the calm regions of the orient day!

Luther caught thy wakening glance;

Like lightning, from his leaden lance

Reflected, it dissolved the visions of the trance

In which, as in a tomb, the nations lay;

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And England's prophets hailed thee as their queen, 145 In songs whose music cannot pass away,

Though it must flow for ever: not unseen

Before the spirit-sighted countenance

Of Milton didst thou pass, from the sad scene
Beyond whose night he saw, with a dejected mien.

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XI.

The eager hours and unreluctant years

As on a dawn-illumined mountain stood,

Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears,
Darkening each other with their multitude,
And cried aloud, Liberty! Indignation

Answered Pity from her cave;

Death grew pale within the grave,

And Desolation howled to the destroyer, Save!
When like heaven's sun girt by the exhalation
Of its own glorious light, thou didst arise,

Chasing thy foes from nation unto nation

Like shadows: as if day had cloven the skies
At dreaming midnight o'er the western wave,
Men started, staggering with a glad surprise,
Under the lightnings of thine unfamiliar eyes.

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XII.

Thou heaven of earth! what spells could pall thee then,
In ominous eclipse? a thousand years
Bred from the slime of deep oppression's den
Dyed all thy liquid light with blood and tears,
Till thy sweet stars could weep the stain away;
How like Bacchanals of blood

Round France, the ghastly vintage, stood
Destruction's sceptred slaves, and Folly's mitred brood!
When one, like them, but mightier far than they,
The Anarch of thine own bewildered powers

Rose: armies mingled in obscure array,

Like clouds with clouds, darkening the sacred bowers

Of serene heaven. He, by the past pursued,

Rests with those dead, but unforgotten hours,

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Whose ghosts scare victor kings in their ancestral towers. 180

XIII.

England yet sleeps: was she not called of old?

Spain calls her now, as with its thrilling thunder Vesuvius wakens Ætna, and the cold

Snow-crags by its reply are cloven in sunder: O'er the lit waves every Æolian isle

From Pithecusa to Pelorus

Howls, and leaps, and glares in chorus:

They cry, Be dim; ye lamps of heaven suspended o'er us. Her chains are threads of gold, she need but smile

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And they dissolve; but Spain's were links of steel, 190 Till bit to dust by virtue's keenest file.

Twins of a single destiny! appeal

To the eternal years enthroned before us,

In the dim West; impress us from a seal,

All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal. 195