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Thou eyrey of the faith! impaled
On spears, their little lives exhaled.
Above thy smooth rock-platform boys
Of tenderest age, and infants flung
From the sheer edge, in torments hung
Wedged into clefts, or bleeding clung
To splintered spires or round them coiled
Convulsive, or like broken toys
By their own childish fingers spoiled
In days of sunny infancy,
Lo! broken on the ground they lie
Beneath the glaring azure sky!
Is memory: of that glorious past
In Sondrian hearts so wholly quenched
That, dubious, now we stand aghast,
By yonder crackpate’s rhetoric drenched?
Where is the stern will nought requires
To spur it to heroic deeds,
The strong, just purpose of our sires
To crush, ere sown, sedition’s seeds?
O glorious butchery! the names
Of the great dead that fed thy flames
Scarce linger in the halls they reared,
Where once they rang beloved and feared.
In Besta’s home the rafter falls
And goitrous squalor throngs the halls,
And through the desecrated court
The Cretin wails his vanished thought.
In Tirano, no more thy name,
O Robustelli! heroes claim,
That once tremendous sped the flood
Of death to Adda running blood:
