STROPHE 2.

Thou youngest giant birth

Which from the groaning earth

Leap'st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale!

Last of the Intercessors!

Who‘ gainst the Crowned Transgressors

Pleadest before God's love! Arrayed in Wisdom's mail,

Wave thy lightning lance in mirth

Nor let thy high heart fail,

Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors

With hurried legions move!

Hail, hail, all hail!

What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme

Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror

To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam

To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer;

A new Actaeon's error

Shall theirs have been — devoured by their own hounds!

Be thou like the imperial Basilisk

Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!

Gaze on Oppression, till at that dread risk

Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk:

Fear not, but gaze — for freemen mightier grow,

And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe:—

If Hope, and Truth, and Justice may avail,

Thou shalt be great — All hail!

From Freedom's form divine,

From Nature's inmost shrine,

Strip every impious gawd, rend

Error veil by veil;

O'er Ruin desolate,

O'er Falsehood's fallen state,

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 fate,

Be thine.— All hail!

Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paean

From land to land re-echoed solemnly,

Till silence became music? From the Aeaean

To the cold Alps, eternal Italy

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,

Within whose veins long ran

The viper's 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!