By falcons on your wrists, it unaware
Arose up overhead, and out of sight.
XXVIII.
Breathe back the deep breath of their old delight,
To swell the Italian banner just unfurled.
Help, lands of Europe ! for, if Austria fight,
The drums will bar your slumber. Who had curled
The laurel for your thousand artists' brows,
If these Italian hands had planted none ?
And who can sit down idle in the house,
Nor hear appeals from Buonarotti's stone
And Raffael's canvas, rousing and to rouse ?
Where's Poussin's master? Gallic Avignon
Bred Laura, and Vaucluse's fount has stirred
The heart of France too strongly,—as it lets
Its little stream out, like a wizard's bird
Which bounds upon its emerald wings, and wets
The rocks on each side—that she should not gird
Her loins with Charlemagne's sword, when foes beset
The country of her Petrarch. Spain may well
Be minded how from Italy she caught,
To mingle with her tinkling Moorish bell,
A fuller cadence and a subtler thought;
And even the New World, the receptacle
Of freemen, may send glad men, as it ought,
To greet Vespucci Amerigo's door;
While England claims, by trump of poetry,
Verona, Venice, the Ravenna shore,
And dearer holds her Milton's Fiesole
Than Malvern with a sunset running o'er.
