LXIV. While Waterloo with Canna's carnage vies, Morat and Marathon twin names shall stand; They were true Glory's stainless victories, Won by the unambitious heart and hand Of a proud, brotherly, and civic band, All unbought champions in no princely cause Of vice-entail'd Corruption; they no land Doom'd to bewail the blasphemy of laws Making kings' rights divine, by some Draconic clause. LXV. By a lone wall a lonelier column rears Yet still with consciousness; and there it stands Making a marvel that it not decays, When the coeval pride of human hands, Levell'd (15) Aventicum, hath strew'd her subject lands. LXVI. And there-oh! sweet and sacred be the name !— Her youth to Heaven; her heart, beneath a claim Their tomb was simple, and without a bust, And held within their urn one mind, one heart, one dust. (16) LXVII. But these are deeds which should not pass away, And names that must not wither, though the earth The enslavers and the enslaved, their death and birth; The high, the mountain-majesty of worth Should be, and shall, survivor of its woe, And from its immortality look forth In the sun's face, like yonder Alpine snow, (17) Imperishably pure beyond all things below, LXVIII. Lake Leman woos me with its crystal face, The mirror where the stars and mountains view Its clear depth yields of their far height and hue: Thoughts hid, but not less cherish'd than of old, LXIX. To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind; All are not fit with them to stir and toil, Nor is it discontent to keep the mind In the hot throng, where we become the spoil We may deplore and struggle with the coil, In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong 'Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong, LXX. There, in a moment, we may plunge our years Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears, To those that walk in darkness: on the sea, The boldest steer but where their ports invite, But there are wanderers o'er Eternity Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor'd ne'er shall be. LXXI. Is it not better, then, to be alone, And love Earth only for its earthly sake? By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone, (18) Which feeds it as a mother who doth make A fair but froward infant her own care, Kissing its cries away as these awake ;– Is it not better thus our lives to wear, Than join the crushing crowd, doom'd to inflict or bear? LXXII. I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me, Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee, LXXIII. And thus I am absorb'd, and this is life: I look upon the peopled desert past, As on a place of agony and strife, Where, for some sin, to Sorrow I was cast, With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring, Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling. |