Sepulchre them, till in their rage they tear A subterranean portal for the river,

It fled the circling sunbows did upbear Its fall down the hoar precipice of spray, Lighting it far upon its lampless way.

XLIII.

And when the wizard lady would ascend

The labyrinths of some many-winding vale, Which to the inmost mountain upward tendShe called "Hermaphroditus!" and the pale And heavy hue which slumber could extend Over its lips and eyes, as on the gale A rapid shadow from a slope of grass, Into the darkness of the stream did pass.

XLIV.

And it unfurled its heaven-coloured pinions, With stars of fire spotting the stream below; And from above into the Sun's dominions

Flinging a glory, like the golden glow

In which spring clothes her emerald-winged
All interwoven with fine feathery snow [minions,
And moonlight splendour of intensest rime,
With which frost paints the pines in winter time.

XLV.

And then it winnowed the Elysian air

Which ever hung about that lady bright,
With its ethereal vans-and speeding there,
Like a star up the torrent of the night,
Or a swift eagle in the morning glare

Breasting the whirlwind with impetuous flight; The pinnace, oared by those enchanted wings, Clove the fierce streams towards their upper springs.

XLVI.

The water flashed like sunlight by the prow

Of a noon-wandering meteor flung to Heaven; The still air seemed as if its waves did flow

In tempest down the mountains,-loosely driven The lady's radiant hair streamed to and fro; Beneath, the billows having vainly striven Indignant and impetuous, roared to feel The swift and steady motion of the keel.

XLVII.

Or, when the weary moon was in the wane,
Or in the noon of interlunar night,
The lady-witch in visions could not chain

Her spirit; but sailed forth under the light
Of shooting stars, and bade extend amain

His storm-outspeeding wings, th' Hermaphrodite; She to the Austral waters took her way, Beyond the fabulous Thamondocona.

XLVIII.

Where, like a meadow which no scythe has shaven, Which rain could never bend, or whirl-blast shake, With the Antarctic constellations paven,

Canopus and his crew, lay th' Austral lakeThere she would build herself a windless haven Out of the clouds whose moving turrets make The bastions of the storm, when through the sky The spirits of the tempest thundered by.

The tremulous stars sparkled unfathomably, And around which the solid vapours hoar, Based on the level waters, to the sky Lifted their dreadful crags; and like a shore Of wintry mountains, inaccessibly Hemmed in with rifts and precipices grey, And hanging crags, many a cove and bay.

L.

And whilst the outer lake beneath the lash
Of the winds' scourge, foamed like a wounded
And the incessant hail with stony clash [thing;
Ploughed up the waters, and the flagging wing
Of the roused cormorant in the lightning flash
Looked like the wreck of some wind-wandering
Fragment of inky thunder-smoke-this haven
Was as a gem to copy Heaven engraven.

LI.

On which that lady played her many pranks,
Circling the image of a shooting star,
Even as a tiger on Hydaspes' banks
Outspeeds the Antelopes which speediest are,
In her light boat; and many quips and cranks
She played upon the water; till the car
Of the late moon, like a sick matron wan,
To journey from the misty east began.

LII.

And then she called out of the hollow turrets
Of those high clouds, white, golden, and vermilion,
The armies of her ministering spirits-

In mighty legions million after million
They came, each troop emblazoning its merits

On meteor flags; and many a proud pavilion,
Of the intertexture of the atmosphere,
They pitched upon the plain of the calm mere.

LIII.

They framed the imperial tent of their great Queen
Of woven exhalations, underlaid
With lambent lightning-fire, as may be seen
A dome of thin and open ivory inlaid
With crimson silk-cressets from the serene
Hung there, and on the water for her tread,
A tapestry of fleece-like mist was strewn,
Dyed in the beams of the ascending moon.

LIV.

And on a throne o'erlaid with starlight, caught
Upon those wandering isles of aery dew,
Which highest shoals of mountain shipwreck not,
She sate, and heard all that had happened new
Between the earth and moon since they had brought
The last intelligence-and now she grew
Pale as that moon, lost in the watery night-
And now she wept, and now she laughed outright.

LV.

These were tame pleasures.-She would often climb
The steepest ladder of the crudded rack
Up to some beaked cape of cloud sublime,
And like Arion on the dolphin's back
Ride singing through the shoreless air. Oft time
Following the serpent lightning's winding track,
She ran upon the platforms of the wind,
And laughed to hear the fire-balls roar behind.

LXXVII.

And then the Witch would let them take no ill: Of many thousand schemes which lovers find The Witch found one,-and so they took their fill Of happiness in marriage warm and kind. Friends who, by practice of some envious skill, Were torn apart, a wide wound, mind from She did unite again with visions clear [mind! Of deep affection and of truth sincere.

LXXVIII.

These were the pranks she played among the cities
Of mortal men, and what she did to sprites
And Gods, entangling them in her sweet ditties,
To do her will, and show their subtle slights,
I will declare another time; for it is

A tale more fit for the weird winter nightsThan for these garish summer days, when we Scarcely believe much more than we can see.

ODE TO NAPLES".

EPODE I. a.

I STOOD within the city disinterred † ;

And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls

Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls;

The oracular thunder penetrating shook

The listening soul in my suspended blood;

I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke—

I felt, but heard not :-through white columns
The isle-sustaining Ocean flood, [glowed

A plane of light between two heavens of azure :
Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre
Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure
Were to spare Death, had never made erasure;
But every living lineament was clear
As in the sculptor's thought; and there
The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy and pine,
Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow,
Seemed only not to move and grow
Because the crystal silence of the air
Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine,
Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.

EPODE II. a.

Then gentle winds arose,
With many a mingled close

Of wild Eolian sound and mountain odour keen ;
And where the Baian ocean
Welters with air-like motion,
Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,
Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves,
Even as the ever stormless atmosphere
Floats o'er the Elysian realm,

It bore me like an Angel, o'er the waves
Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air

The Author has connected many recollections of his visit to Pompeii and Baie with the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional Government at Naples. This has given a tinge of pieturesque and descriptive imagery to the introductory Epodes, which depicture the scenes and some of the majestic feelings permanently connected with the scene of this animating event.-Author's Note.

+ Pompeii.

No storm can overwhelm ;
I sailed where ever flows
Under the calm Serene

A spirit of deep emotion,
From the unknown graves

Of the dead kings of Melody *.
Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm
The horizontal æther; heaven stript bare
Its depths over Elysium, where the prow
Made the invisible water white as snow;
From that Typhæan mount, Inarime,

There streamed a sunlike vapour, like the standard
Of some ethereal host;
Whilst from all the coast,

Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered
Over the oracular woods and divine sea
Prophesyings which grew articulate—

They seize me--I must speak them;-be they fate!

STROPHE a. 1.

NAPLES! thou Heart of men, which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven!
Elysian City, which to calm enchantest

The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even
As sleep round Love, are driven !
Metropolis of a ruined Paradise

Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained! Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice,

Which armed Victory offers up unstained
To Love, the flower-enchained!

Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,
Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail.
Hail, hail, all hail !

[hounds!

Shall theirs have been-devoured by their own
Be thou like the imperial Basilisk,
Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!
Gaze on oppression, till at that dread risk
Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk:
Fear not, but gaze-for freemen mightier grow,
And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe.

If Hope, and Truth, and Justice may avail,
Thou shalt be great.-All hail !

ANTISTROPHE B. 2.
From Freedom's form divine,
From Nature's inmost shrine,

* Homer and Virgil.

Strip every impious gawd, rend Error veil by veil : O'er Ruin desolate,

O'er Falsehood's fallen state,

Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale! And equal laws be thine,

And winged words let sail,

Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:
That wealth, surviving fate,
Be thine.-All hail!

ANTISTROPHE a. 7.

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paan
From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the xan
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy

Starts to hear thine! The Sea
Which paves the desert streets of Venice, laughs
In light and music; widowed Genoa wan,
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,
Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan,
Within whose veins long ran
The viper's palsying venom, lifts her heel
To bruise his head. The signal and the seal
(If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail)
Art Thou of all these hopes.-O hail!

As ruling once by power, so now by admiration, An athlete stript to run

From a remoter station

For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore :As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail, So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!

EPODE 1. B.

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms
Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?
The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
Bursting their inaccessible abodes

Of crags and thunder clouds?

See ye the banners blazoned to the day,
Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?
Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,

The Serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide
With iron light is dyed,

The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions
Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating;
An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions
And lawless slaveries,-down the aerial regions
Of the white Alps, desolating,
Famished wolves that bide no waiting,
Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,
Trampling our columned cities into dust,
Their dull and savage lust

[hoary

On Beauty's corse to sickness satiating
They come ! The fields they tread look black and
With fire-from their red feet the streams run
gory!

EPODE II. B.

Great Spirit, deepest Love! Which rulest and dost move

Exa, the Island of Circe.

+ The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.

All things which live and are, within the Italian
Who spreadest heaven around it, [shore;
Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it;
Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's western floor,
Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command

The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison !
From the Earth's bosom chill;

O bid those beams be each a blinding brand
Of lightning bid those showers be dews of poison!
Bid the Earth's plenty kill!
Bid thy bright Heaven above
Whilst light and darkness bound it,
Be their tomb who planned
To make it ours and thine!

Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill
And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon
Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire-
Be man's high hope and unextinct desire
The instrument to work thy will divine!
Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leo-
And frowns and fears from Thee, [pards,
Would not more swiftly flee,
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.-
Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, Oh let be
This City of thy worship, ever free!

DEATH.

DEATH is here, and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death-and we are death.

Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,

First our pleasures die-and then
Our hopes, and then our fears-and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust-and we die too.

All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves, must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot-
Love itself would, did they not.