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Sibylline Leaves.

I. POEMS

OCCASIONED BY POLITICAL EVENTS,

OR FEELINGS CONNECTED WITH THEM.

WHEN I have borne in memory what has tamed
Great nations, how ennobling thoughts depart
When men change swords for ledgers, and desert
The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed
I had, my country! Am I to be blamed?
But, when I think of Thee, and what thou art,
Verily in the bottom of my heart,

Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed.

But dearly must we prize thee; we who find

In thee a bulwark of the cause of men;

And I by my affection was beguiled.
What wonder if a poet, now and then,
Among the many movements of his mind,
Felt for thee as a Lover or a Child.

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Το μέλλον ἥξει. Καὶ σύ μ' ἐν τάχει παρὼν
*Αγαν γ' ἀληθόμαντιν οἰκτείρας ἐρεῖς.

ARGUMENT.

Eschyl. Agam. 1225.

THE Ode commences with an address to the Divine Providence, that regulates into one vast harmony all the

* This Ode was composed on the 24th, 25th, and 26th of December, 1796, and was first published on the last day of that year

events of time, however calamitous some of them may appear to mortals. The second Strophe calls on men to suspend their private joys and sorrows, and devote them for a while to the cause of human nature in general. The first Epode speaks of the Empress of Russia, who died of an apoplexy on the 17th of November, 1796; having just concluded a subsidiary treaty with the Kings combined against France. The first and second Antistrophe describe the image of the Departing Year, &c., as in a vision. The second Epode prophesies, in anguish of spirit, the downfall of this country.

I.

SPIRIT who sweepest the wild harp of Time!

It is most hard, with an untroubled ear Thy dark inwoven harmonies to hear!

Yet, mine eye fixed on Heaven's unchanging clime, Long had I listened, free from mortal fear,

With inward stillness, and a bowed mind; When lo! its folds far waving on the wind, I saw the train of the departing Year! Starting from my silent sadness

Then with no unholy madness,

Ere yet the entered cloud foreclosed my sight, I raised the impetuous song, and solemnized his flight.

II.

Hither, from the recent tomb,

From the prison's direr gloom,

From distemper's midnight anguish ;

And thence, where poverty doth waste and lan

guish !

Or where, his two bright torches blending,

Love illumines manhood's maze;

Or where, o'er cradled infants bending,
Hope has fixed her wishful gaze ;

Hither, in perplexed dance,

Ye Woes! ye young-eyed Joys! advance!

By Time's wild harp, and by the hand
Whose indefatigable sweep

Raises its fateful strings from sleep,

I bid you haste, a mixed tumultuous band!
From every private bower,

And each domestic hearth,

Haste for one solemn hour;

And with a loud and yet a louder voice,
O'er Nature struggling in portentous birth,
Weep and rejoice!

Still echoes the dread name that o'er the earth
Let slip the storm, and woke the brood of Hell:
And now advance in saintly jubilee.

Justice and Truth! They too have heard thy spell, They too obey thy name, divinest Liberty!

III.

I marked Ambition in his war-array!

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I heard the mailed Monarch's troublous cryAh! wherefore does the Northern Conqueress stay!

Groans not her chariot on its onward way?"

Fly, mailed Monarch, fly!

Stunned by Death's twice mortal mace,
No more on Murder's lurid face

The imperial hag shall gloat with drunken eye!
Manes of the unnumbered slain!

Ye that gasped on Warsaw's plain!

Ye that erst at Ismail's tower,

When human ruin choked the streams,
Fell in conquest's glutted hour,

Mid women's shrieks and infants' screams!

And my thick and struggling breath
Imitates the toil of death!

No stranger agony confounds

The soldier on the war-field spread, When all foredone with toil and wounds,

Death-like he dozes among heaps of dead!

(The strife is o'er, the day-light fled, And the night-wind clamors hoarse!

See! the starting wretch's head

Lies pillowed on a brother's corse

!)

VII.

Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile,
O Albion! O my mother Isle!
Thy valleys, fair as Eden's bowers,
Glitter green with sunny showers:
Thy grassy upland's gentle swells
Echo to the bleat of flocks;
(Those grassy hills, those glittering dells
Proudly ramparted with rocks)
And Ocean, mid his uproar wild,
Speaks safety to his island-child.

Hence for many a fearless age
Has social Quiet loved thy shore;

Nor ever proud invader's rage

Or sacked thy towers, or stained thy fields with

gore.

VIII.

Abandoned of Heaven! mad avarice thy guide,
At cowardly distance, yet kindling with pride-
Mid thy herds and thy corn-fields secure thou hast
stood,

And joined the wild yelling of famine and blood! ·

The nations curse thee! They with eager wonder

ing

Shall hear Destruction, like a vulture, scream! Strange-eyed Destruction! who with many a dream

Of central fires through nether seas upthundering
Soothes her fierce solitude; yet as she lies
By livid fount, or red volcanic stream,
If ever to her lidless dragon-eyes,

O Albion! thy predestined ruins rise,
The fiend-hag on her perilous couch doth leap,
Muttering distempered triumph in her charmed
sleep.

IX.

Away, my soul, away!

In vain, in vain the birds of warning sing-
And hark! I hear the famished brood of prey
Flap their lank pennons on the groaning wind!
Away, my soul, away!

I unpartaking of the evil thing,
With daily prayer and daily toil

Soliciting for food my scanty soil,

Have wailed my country with a loud Lament. Now I recentre my immortal mind

In the deep sabbath of meek self-content; Cleansed from the vaporous passions that bedim God's Image, sister of the Seraphim.

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