O bear me to those isles of jagged cloud

Which float like mountains on the earthquakes, 'mid The momentary oceans of the lightning;

Or to some toppling promontory proud
Of solid tempest, whose black pyramid,

Riven, overhangs the founts intensely brightening
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire,

When heaven and earth are light, and only light
In the thunder-night!

Voice without Viciory! Victory! Austria, Russia,
England,

And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France,
Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak!
Ho, there' bring torches, sharpen those red stakes!
These chains are light, fitter for slaves and prisoners
Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none remain.
Semicho. I. Alas for Liberty!

If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years
Of fate, can quell the free:

Alas for Virtue! when

Torments, or contumely, or the sneers
Oferring-judging men

Can break the heart where it abides.

Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure more splendid,

Can change, with its false times and tides,

Like hope and terror-
Alas for Love!

And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror

Before the dazzled eyes of error.

Alas for thee! Image of the above.

Semicho. II. Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,

Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn

Through many a hostile Anarchy !

At length they wept aloud and cried, "The sea' the

sea:"

Through exile, persecution, and despair,

Rome was, aud young Atlantis shall become

The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb,

Of all whose step wakes power, lull'd in her savage lair
But Greece was as a hermit child,

Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
To woman's growth by dreams so mild,
She knew not pain nor guilt;

And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble,
When ye desert the free!

If Greece must be

A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime,

To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.

Semicho. I. Let the tyrants rule the desert they have

made;

Let the free possess the Paradise they claim; Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weigh'd

With our ruin, our resistance, and our name! Semicho. II. Our dead shall be the seed of their decay, Our survivors be the shadow of their pride,

Our adversity a dream to pass away

Their dishonour a remembrance to abide !

Voice without. Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends

The keys of ocean to the Islamite.

Nor shall the blazon of the cross be veil'd,

And British skill directing Othman might,
Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh keep holy
This jubilee of unrevenged blood!

Kill crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape!
Semicho. I, Darkness has dawn'd in the East
On the noon of time:

The death-birds descend to their feast

From the hungry clime.

Let Freedom and Peace flee far

To a sunnier strand,

And follow Love's folding star

To the evening land!

Semicho. II. The young moon has fed

Her exhausted horn

With the sunset's fire;
The weak day is dead,

But the night is not born;

[sire

And, like loveliness panting with wild de-
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening might.

And pants in its beauty and speed with light
Fast-flashing, soft, and bright.

Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!
Guide us far, far away,

To climes where now, veil'd by the ardour of day,
Thou art hidden

From waves on which weary Noon
Faints in her summer swoon,

Between kingless continents, sinless as Eden,
Around mountains and islands inviolably

Prankt on the sapphire sea.

Semicho. I. Through the sunset of hope,

Like the shapes of a dream,

What Paradise islands of glory gleam
Beneath Heaven's cope.

Their shadows more clear float by

The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky,
The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe,
Burst like morning on dreams, or like Heaven on
death,

Through the walls of our prison;

And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!
Cho. The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,

The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:

Heaven smiled, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;

A new Peneus rolls its fountains

Against the morning-star.

Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads, on a sunnier deep;
A loftier Argos cleaves the main,

Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Oh write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death's scroll must be !
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtle sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew,
Another Athens shall arise,

And to remoter time

Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendor of its prime;

And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose

Shall burst, more wise and good Than all who fell, than one who rose, Than many unwithstood

Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers
But native tears, and symbol flowers,
Oh cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?

Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.

The world is weary of the past-
Oh might it die or rest at last!

END OF HELLAS

JULIAN AND MADDALO;

A CONVERSATION.

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the ow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,

Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks

The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes

A narrow space of level sand thereon,

Where 'twas our wont to ride while day went down:
This ride was my delight. I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows; and yet more
Than all, with a remembered friend I love
To ride as then I rode for the winds drove
The living spray along the sunny air

Into our faces: the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening north;
And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth
Harmonizing with solitude, and sent

Into our hearts aerial merriment.

So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought, W nging itself with laughter, lingered not,

But flew from brain to brain,-such glee was ours,