ODE. I.. OH Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls In contrast with their fathers as the slime, 10 The dull green ooze of the receding deep, 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, And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum, 20 The echo of thy tyrants voice along The soft waves, once all musical to song, Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds 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. 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; Chamber swims round and round and the dizzy 50 and shadows busy, At which he vainly catches, flit and gleam, 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, A blindfold bondage, where your hire is blows. 70 Spring from a different theme! Ye see and read, |