Their bones in the grave will start and move, Wave, Wave high the banner! Though the slaves that fan her Glory, glory, glory, To those who have greatly suffered and done! Never name in story Was greater than that which ye shall have won. Conquerors have conquered their foes alone, Whose revenge, pride, and power, they have overthrown : Ride ye, more victorious, over your own. Bind, bind every brow Hide the blood-stains now UDE TO HEAVEN. CHORUS OF SPIRITS. FIRST SPIRIT. PALACE-ROOF of cloudless nights ! Deep, immeasurable, vast, Of the present and the past, Presence-chamber, temple, home; Glorious shapes have life in thee, Living globes which ever throng And green worlds that glide along; And swift stars with flashing tresses ; And icy moons most cold and bright, Even thy name is as a god, Of that power which is the glass Wherein man his nature sees. Generations as they pass Their unremaining gods and they away ; SECOND SPIRIT. Thou art but the mind's first chamber, Like weak insects in a cave, But the portal of the grave, Will make thy best glories seem a THIRD SPIRIT. Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn At your presumption, atom-born! What is heaven? and what are ye Who its brief expanse inherit ? Of which ye are but a part ? Some eyed flower, whose young leaves waken On an unimagined world : Constellated suns unshaken, In that frail and fading sphere, ODE TO THE WEST WIND. I. O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, * This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset, with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it. Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; II. Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread Of some fierce Mænad, eren from the dim verge |