Their bones in the grave will start and move, Wave, wave high the banner! When Freedom is riding to conquest by: Be famine and toil, giving sigh for sigh. Glory, glory, glory, To those who have greatly suffered and done! Never name in story Was greater than that which ye shall have won. Conquerors have conquered their foes alone, Whose revenge, pride, and power, they have overthrown: Ride ye, more victorious, over your own. Bind, bind every brow With crownals of violet, ivy, and pine: Hide the blood-stains now With hues which sweet nature has made divine,Green strength, azure hope, and eternity. But let not the pansy among them be; Ye were injured, and that means memory. ODE TO HEAVEN. CHORUS OF SPIRITS. FIRST SPIRIT. PALACE-ROOF of cloudless nights! Deep, immeasurable, vast, Which art now and which wert then Of acts and ages yet to come! Glorious shapes have life in thee, Living globes which ever throng Even thy name is as a god, Heaven! for thou art the abode Of that power which is the glass Thou remainest such alway. SECOND SPIRIT. Thou art but the mind's first chamber, Lighted up by stalactites; But the portal of the grave, Where a world of new delights Will make thy best glories seem But a dim and noonday gleam From the shadow of a dream! THIRD SPIRIT. Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn At your presumption, atom-born! What is heaven? and what are ye Who its brief expanse inherit? What are suns and spheres which flee With the instinct of that spirit Of which ye are but a part? Drops which Nature's mighty heart Drives through thinnest veins. Depart! What is heaven? a globe of dew, Filling in the morning new Some eyed flower, whose young leaves waken On an unimagined world: Constellated suns unshaken, ODE TO THE WEST WIND.* 1. O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, * This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood taat skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset, with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently fluenced by the winds which announce it. Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; 11. Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge |