ODE.

I..

OH Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be
A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,
A loud lament along the sweeping sea!
If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee,
What should thy sons do? any thing but weep;
And yet they only murmur in their sleep.

In contrast with their fathers

as the slime,

10

The dull green ooze of the receding deep,
Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam,
That drives the sailor shipless to his home,
Are they to those that were; and thus they creep,
Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping

Oh! agony

streets.

that centuries should rcap

No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years

Of wealth and glory turn'd to dust and tears;

And every monument the stranger meets,
Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets;
And even the Lion all subdued appears,

And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum, 20
With dull and daily dissonance, repeats

The echo of thy tyrants voice along

The soft waves, once all musical to song,
That heaved beneath the moonlight with the throng
Of gondolas - and to the busy hum

Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds
Were but the overbeating of the heart,

And flow of too much happiness, which needs The aid of age to turn its course apart

From the luxuriant and voluptuous flood

Of sweet sensations, battling with the blood.
But these are better than the gloomy errors,
The weeds of nations in their last decay,

30

When Vice walks forth with her unsoften'd terrors, And Mirth is madness; and but smiles to slay; And Hope is nothing but a false delay,

The sick man's lightning half an hour ere death, When Faintness, the last mortal birth of Pain,

And apathy of limb, the dull beginning

Of the cold staggering race which Death is winning, Steals vein by vein and pulse by pulse away; 41 Yet so relieving the o'er-tortured clay,

To him appears renewal of his breath,

And freedom the mere numbness of his chain;

And then he talks of life, and how again

And of the fresher air, which he would seek;
And as he whispers knows not that he gasps,
That his thin finger feels not what it clasps,
And so the film comes o'er him

Chamber swims round and round

and the dizzy 50

and shadows

busy,

At which he vainly catches, flit and gleam,
Till the last rattle chokes the strangled scream,
And all is ice and blackness, and the earth

That which it was the moment ere our birth,

The flow and ebb of each recurring age,

The everlasting to be which hath been,

Hath taught us nought or little: still we lean fo and wear Our strength away in wrestling with the air; For 'tis our nature strikes us down: the beasts Slaughter'd in hourly hecatombs for feasts

On things that rot beneath our weight,

Even where their driver goads them, though to slaughter.

Ye men, who pour your blood for kings as water,
What have they given your children in return?
A heritage of servitude and woes,

A blindfold bondage, where your hire is blows. 70
What! do not yet the red-hot ploughshares burn,
O'er which you stumble in a false ordeal,
And deem this proof of loyalty the real;
Kissing the hand that guides you to your scars,
And glorying as you tread the glowing bars?
All that your sires have left you, all that Time
Bequeaths of free, and History of sublime,

Spring from a different theme!

Ye see and read,