The unmaternal bosom of the North.
Haste, Sons of God, . . for ye beheld,
Reluctant or consenting or astonished,

The stern decrees go forth which heaped on Greece
Ruin and degradation and despair.

A fourth now waits. Assemble, Sons of God,

To speed or to prevent or to suspend

(If, as ye dream, such power be not withheld) The unaccomplished destiny.

From every point of the Infinite,
Like a thousand dawns on a single night
The splendours rise and spread.

And through thunder and darkness dread
Light and music are radiated,

And, in their pavilioned chariots led
By living wings, high overhead

The giant Powers move,

Gloomy or bright as the thrones they fill.

Almighty Father!

Low-kneeling at the feet of Destiny

There are two fountains in which spirits weep
When mortals err, Discord and Slavery named;

And with their bitter dew two Destinies
Filled each their irrevocable urns. The third,
Fiercest and mightiest, mingled both, and added
Chaos and death, and slow oblivion's lymph,
And hate and terror, and the poisoned rain

Whose pores wept tears of blood; by these wide wounds; By this imperial crown of agony;

By infamy and solitude and death,

(For this I underwent); and by the pain
Of pity for those who would. . for me
The unremembered joy of a revenge,
(For this I felt); by Plato's sacred light,
Of which my spirit was a burning morrow;
By Greece, and all she cannot cease to be,
Her quenchless words, sparks of immortal truth,
Stars of all night-her harmonies and forms,
Echoes and shadows of what Love adores
In thee; I do compel thee, send forth Fate,
Thy irrevocable child! Let her descend,
A seraph-winged victory [arrayed]

In tempest of the omnipotence of God
Which sweeps through all things.

From hollow leagues, from Tyranny which arms
Adverse miscreeds and emulous anarchies

To stamp, as on a winged serpent's seed,

Upon the name of Freedom; from the storm

Of faction, which like earthquake shakes and sickens
The solid heart of enterprise; from all

By which the holiest dreams of highest spirits
Are stars beneath the dawn..

She shall arise

Victorious as the world arose from chaos!
And, as the heavens and the earth arrayed
Their presence in the beauty and the light
Of thy first smile, O Father; as they gather
The spirit of thy love, which paves for them
Their path o'er the abyss, till every sphere
Shall be one living spirit; so shall Greece-

SATAN.

Be as all things beneath the empyrean,

Mine!

Art thou eyeless like old Destiny, Thou mockery-king, crowned with a wreath of thornsWhose sceptre is a reed, the broken reed

Which pierces thee, whose throne a chair of scorn?

For seest thou not beneath this crystal floor

The innumerable worlds of golden light

Which are my empire, and the least of them

which thou wouldst redeem from me? Know'st thou not them my portion?

Or wouldst rekindle the . strife

Which our great Father then did arbitrate
When he assigned to his competing sons
Each his apportioned realm?

Thou Destiny,

Thou who art mailed in the omnipotence
Of Him who sends thee forth, whate'er thy task,
Speed, spare not to accomplish! and be mine
Thy trophies, whether Greece again become
The fountain in the desert whence the earth
Shall drink of freedom, which shall give it strength
To suffer, or a gulf of hollow death

To swallow all delight, all life, all hope.
Go, thou vicegerent of my will, no less

Than of the Father's. But, lest thou shouldst faint,
The winged hounds famine and pestilence

Shall wait on thee; the hundred-forkèd snake
Insatiate superstition still shall

The earth behind thy steps; and war shall hover
Above, and fraud shall gape below, and change
Shall flit before thee on her dragon wings,
Convulsing and consuming.

And I add

Three phials of the tears which demons weep
When virtuous spirits through the gate of death
Pass triumphing over the thorns of life,-

Sceptres and crowns, mitres and swords and snares,
Trampling in scorn, like him and Socrates.

The first is anarchy; when power and pleasure,
Glory and science and security,

On freedom hang like fruit on the green tree,
Then pour it forth, and men shall gather ashes.
The second, tyranny—

CHRIST.

Obdurate spirit!

Thou seest but the past in the to-come.

Pride is thy error and thy punishment.

Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
Before the Power that wields and kindles them.
True greatness asks not space; true excellence
Lives in the Spirit of all things that live,

Which lends it to the worlds thou callest thine.

MAHOMET.

Haste thou, and fill the waning crescent

With beams as keen as those which pierced the shadow

1821.

Of Christian night rolled back upon the West
When the orient moon of Islam rode in triumph
From Tmolus to the Acroceraunian snow.

Wake, thou word

Of God, and from the throne of Destiny
Even to the utmost limit of thy way
May triumph

Be thou a curse on them whose creed Divides and multiplies the most high God!

XXV.

I WOULD not be a king-Enough
Of woe it is to love :

The path to power is steep and rough,
And tempests reign above.

I would not climb the imperial throne;
'Tis built on ice which fortune's sun
Thaws in the height of noon.
Then farewell, king! Yet, were I one,

Care would not come so soon.
Would he and I were far away
Keeping flocks on Himalay!

XXVI.

O THOU immortal deity

Whose throne is in the depth of human thought,
I do adjure thy power and thee

By all that man may be, by all that he is not,
By all that he has been and yet must be !

XXVII.

HE wanders, like a day-appearing dream,
Through the dim wildernesses of the mind;

Through desert woods and tracts, which seem
Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

XXVIII.

GINEVRA.

WILD, pale, and wonder-stricken, even as one
Who staggers forth into the air and sun
From the dark chamber of a mortal fever,-
Bewildered, and incapable, and ever

Fancying strange comments, in her dizzy brain,
Of usual shapes, till the familiar train
Of objects and of persons passed like things
Strange as a dreamer's mad imaginings,—
Ginevra from the nuptial altar went ;

The vows to which her lips had sworn assent
Rung in her brain still with a jarring din,
Deafening the lost intelligence within.

And so she moved under the bridal veil,
Which made the paleness of her cheek more pale,
And deepened the faint crimson of her mouth,
And darkened her dark locks, as moonlight doth;
And of the gold and jewels glittering there
She scarce felt conscious, but the weary glare
Lay like a chaos of unwelcome light,
Vexing the sense with gorgeous undelight,
A moonbeam in the shadow of a cloud
Were less heavenly fair. Her face was bowed;
And, as she passed, the diamonds in her hair
Were mirrored in the polished marble stair
Which led from the cathedral to the street;
And ever as she went her light fair feet
Erased these images.

The bridemaidens who round her thronging came :Some with a sense of self-rebuke and shame,

Envying the unenviable; and others

Making the joy which should have been another's

Their own by gentle sympathy; and some
Sighing to think of an unhappy home;

Some few admiring what can ever lure
Maidens to leave the heaven serene and pure

Of parents' smiles for life's great cheat-a thing
Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining

But they are all dispersed—and lo! she stands
Looking in idle grief on her white hands,
Alone within the garden now her own,
(And through the sunny air, with jangling tone,
The music of the merry marriage-bells,
Killing the azure silence, sinks and swells)-
Absorbed like one within a dream who dreams
That he is dreaming, until slumber seems
A mockery of itself-when suddenly
Antonio stood before her, pale as she.

With agony, with sorrow, and with pride,
He lifted his wan eyes upon the bride,

And said "Is this thy faith?" And then, as one
Whose sleeping face is stricken by the sun