A Corner of the Palatine Hill. Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grown Matted and mass'd together, hillocks heap'd On what were chambers, arch crush'd, column strown In fragments, choked up vaults, Behold the Imperial Mount! 't is thus the mighty falls." - Childe Harold, Canto IV, stanza cvii, p. 88. would be base enough to convey my carcase back to your soil. I would not even feed your worms, if I could help it. ODE ON VENICE I O Venice Venice! when thy marble walls In contrast with their fathers as the slime, No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years That heaved beneath the moonlight with the throng Of cheerful creatures, whose most sinful deeds When Vice walks forth with her unsoften'd terrors, The sick man's lightning half an hour ere death, Of the cold staggering race which Death is winning, And so the film comes o'er him—and the dizzy Chamber swims round and round and shadows busy, At which he vainly catches, flit and gleam, Till the last rattle chokes the strangled scream, - And all is ice and blackness, and the earth II There is no hope for nations! Search the page Of many thousand years the daily scene, The flow and ebb of each recurring age, The everlasting to be which hath been, Hath taught us nought or little still we lean Are of as high an order-they must go Even where their driver goads them, though to slaughter. A blindfold bondage, where your hire is blows. And worse than all, the sudden crimes engender'd |