Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/643

O'er Ruin desolate,
O'er Falsehood's fallen state.95
Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale!
And equal laws be thine,
And winged words let sail,
Freighted with truth even from the throne of God:
That wealth, surviving^[1] fate,100
Be thine.— All hail!

antistrophe i β

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paean.

From land to land re-echoed solemnly,
Till silence became music? From the Aeaean^[2]
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy 105
Starts to hear thine! The Sea
Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs
In light and music; widowed Genoa wan
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,
Murmuring, 'Where is Doria?' fair Milan, 110
Within whose veins long ran
The viper's^[3] palsying venom, lifts her heel
To bruise his head. The signal and the seal
(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)
Art thou of all these hopes.—O hail! 115

antistrophe ii β

Florence! beneath the sun,

Of cities fairest one,
Blushes within her bower for Freedom's expectation:
From eyes of quenchless hope
Rome tears the priestly cope, 120
As ruling once by power, so now by admiration,—
An athlete stripped to run
From a remoter station
For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore:—
As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail, 125
So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!

epode i β

Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms

Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?
The crash and darkness of a thousand storms
Bursting their inaccessible abodes 130
Of crags and thunder-clouds?
See ye the banners blazoned to the day,
Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?
Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,
The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide 135
With iron light is dyed;

1. wealth-surviving cj. A. C. Bradley.
2. Aeaea, the island of Circe.—[Shelley's Note.]
3. The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.—[Shelley's Note.]