Led by their temper'd sires, on lawless men,
The last worst monsters of the shaggy wood,
Turn'd the keen arrow, and the sharpen'd spear.
Then war grew glorious. Heroes then arose;
Who, scorning coward self, for others lived,
Toil'd for their ease, and for their safety bled.
West, with the living day, to Greece I came :
Earth smiled beneath my beam: the Muse before
Sonorous flew, that low till then in woods

Had tuned the reed, and sigh'd the shepherd's
pain;

But now, to sing heroic deeds, she swell'd
A nobler note, and bade the banquet burn.
'For Greece my sons of Egypt I forsook;
A boastful race, that in the vain abyss
Of fabling ages loved to lose their source,
And with their river traced it from the skies.
While there my laws alone despotic reign'd,
And king, as well as people, proud obey'd;
I taught them science, virtue, wisdom, arts;
By poets, sages, legislators sought;

The school of polish'd life, and human kind.
But when mysterious Superstition came,
And, with her Civil Sister leagued, involved
In studied darkness the desponding mind;

Conspired to blow the flower of human kind,
And lavish'd all that genius can inspire.
Clear, sunny climates, by the breezy main,
Ionian or Ægean, temper'd kind:

Light, airy soils: a country rich, and gay
Broke into hills with balmy odours crown'd,
And, bright with purple harvest, joyous vales:
Mountains, and streams, where verse spontaneous
flow'd;

Whence deem'd by wondering men the seat of
gods,

And still the mountains and the streams of song.
All that boon Nature could luxuriant pour
Of high materials, and my restless Arts
Frame into finish'd life. How many states,
And clustering towns, and monuments of fame,
And scenes of glorious deeds, in little bounds?
From the rough tract of bending mountains, beat
By Adria's here, there by Egean waves;
To where the deep adorning Cyclade Isles
In shining prospect rise, and on the shore
Of farthest Crete resounds the Libyan main.
'O'er all two rival cities rear'd the brow,
And balanced all. Spread on Eurofas' bank,
Amid a circle of soft rising hills,

Then Tyrant Power the righteous scourge un- The patient Sparta one: the sober, hard,

loosed:

For yielded reason speaks the soul a slave.
Instead of useful works, like nature's, great,
Enormous, cruel wonders crush'd the land;
And round a tyrant's tomb,† who none deserved,
For one vile carcass perish'd countless lives.
Then the great Dragon,‡ couch'd amid his floods,
Swell'd his fierce heart, and cried, "This flood is
mine,

'Tis I that bid it flow." But, undeceived,
His frenzy soon the proud blasphemer felt;
Felt that, without my fertilizing power,
Suns lost their force, and Niles o'erflow'd in vain.
Nought could retard me: nor the frugal state
Of rising Persia, sober in extreme,
Beyond the pitch of man, and thence reversed
Into luxurious waste: nor yet the ports
Of old Phoenicia; first for letters famed,
That paint the voice, and silent speak to sight;
Of arts prime source, and guardian! by fair stars,
First tempted out into the lonely deep;
To whom I first disclosed mechanic arts,
The winds to conquer, to subdue the waves,
With all the peaceful power of ruling trade;
Earnest of Britain. Nor by these retain'd;
Nor by the neighbouring land, whose palmy shore
The silver Jordan laves. Before me lay
The promised Land of Arts, and urged my flight.
'Hail, Nature's utmost boast! unrival'd Greece!
My fairest reign! where every power benign

And man-subduing city; which no shape
Of pain could conquer, nor of pleasure charm.
Lycurgus there built, on the solid base
Of equal life, so well a temper'd state;
Where mix'd each government, in such just poise;
Each power so checking, and supporting each;
That firm for ages, and unmoved, it stood,
The fort of Greece! without one giddy hour,
One shock of faction, or of party rage.
For, drain'd the springs of wealth, Corruption
there

Lay wither'd at the root. Thrice happy land!
Had not neglected art, with weedy vice
Confounded, sunk. But if Athenian arts
Loved not the soil; yet there the calm abode
Of wisdom, virtue, philosophic ease,
Of manly sense and wit, in frugal phrase
Confined, and press'd into Laconic force.
There too, by rooting thence still treacherous self,
The Public and the Private grew the same.
The children of the nursing Public all,
And at its table fed; for that they toil'd,
For that they lived entire, and even for that
The tender mother urged her son to die.

'Of softer genius, but not less intent
To seize the palm of empire, Athens rose.
Where, with bright marbles big and future pomp,"
Hymettus* spread, amid the scented sky,
His thymy treasures to the labouring bee,
And to botanic hand the stores of health;
Wrapt in a soul-attenuating clime,

"A mountain near Athens.

Between Ilissus and Cephissus* glow'd
This hive of science, shedding sweets divine,
Of active arts, and animated arms.
There, passionate for me, an easy moved,
A quick, refined, a delicate, humane,
Enlighten'd people reign'd. Oft on the brink
Of ruin, hurried by the charm of speech,
Inforcing hasty counsel immature,
Totter'd the rash Democracy; unpoised,
And by the rage devour'd, that ever tears
A populace unequal; part too rich,
And part or fierce with want or abject grown.
Solon at last, their mild restorer, rose:
Allay'd the tempest; to the calm of laws
Reduced the settling whole; and, with the weight
Which the two senatest to the public lent,
As with an anchor fix'd the driving state.

'Nor was my forming care to these confin'd.
For emulation through the whole I pour'd,
Noble contention! who should most excel
In government well poised, adjusted best
To public weal: in countries cultured high:
In ornamented towns, where order reigns,
Free social life, and polish'd manners fair
In exercise, and arms; arms only drawn
For common Greece, to quell the Persian pride:
In moral science, and in graceful arts.
Hence, as for glory peacefully they strove,
The prize grew greater, and the prize of all.
By contest brighten'd, hence the radiant youth,
Pour'd every beam; by generous pride inflamed,
Felt every ardour burn: their great reward
The verdant wreath, which sounding Pisat gave.
'Hence flourish'd Greece; and hence a race of
men;

As gods by conscious future times adored:
In whom each virtue wore a smiling air,
Each science shed o'er life a friendly light,
Each art was nature. Spartan valour hence,
At the famed pass,§ firm as an isthmus stood;
And the whole eastern ocean, waving far
As eye could dart its vision, nobly check'd.
While in extended battle, at the field
Of Marathon, my keen Athenians drove
Before their ardent band a host of slaves.
'Hence through the continent ten thousand
Greeks

Urged a retreat, whose glory not the prime
Of victories can reach. Deserts, in vain,
Opposed their course; and hostile lands, unknown;

*Two rivers, betwixt which Athens was situated.

The Areopagus, or Supreme Court of Judicature, which Solon reformed and improved: and the council of Four Hundred, by him instituted. In this council all affairs of state were deliberated, before they came to be voted in the assembly of the people.

Or Olympia, the city where the Olympic games were

celebrated.

$ The Straits of Thermopylæ.

And deep rapacious floods, dire bank'd with death;
And mountains, in whose jaws destruction grinn'd;
Hunger, and toil; Armenian snows, and storms;
And circling myriads still of barbarous foes.
Greece in their view, and glory yet untouch'd,
Their steady column pierced the scattering herds,
Which a whole empire pour'd; and held its way
Triumphant, by the sage-exalted Chief*
Fired and sustain'd. Oh light and force of mind,
Almost almighty in severe extremes!

The sea at last from Colchian mountains seen,
Kind-hearted transport round their captains threw
The soldiers' fond embrace; o'erflow'd their eyes
With tender floods, and loosed the general voice
To cries resounding loud-"The sea! The sea!"
'In Attic bounds hence heroes, sages, wits,
Shone thick as stars, the milky way of Greece!
And though gay wit, and pleasing grace was theirs,
All the soft modes of elegance, and ease;
Yet was not courage less, the patient touch
Of toiling art, and disquisition deep.

My spirit pours a vigour through the soul,
The unfetter'd thought with energy inspires,
Invincible in arts, in the bright field

Of nobler Science, as in that of Arms.
Athenians thus not less intrepid burst
The bonds of tyrant darkness, than they spurn'd
The Persian chains: while through the city full
Of mirthful quarrel and of witty war,
Incessant struggled taste refining taste,
And friendly free discussion, calling forth
From the fair jewel Truth its latent ray.
O'er all shone out the great Athenian Sage,t
And Father of Philosophy; the sun,
From whose white blaze emerged, each various
sect

Took various tints, but with diminish'd beam.
Tutor of Athens! he, in every street,
Dealt priceless treasure: goodness his delight,
Wisdom his wealth, and glory his reward.
Deep through the human heart, with playful art,
His simple question stole: as into truth,
And serious deeds, he smiled the laughing race;
Taught moral happy life, whate'er can bless,
Or grace mankind; and what he taught he was.
Compounded high, though plain, his doctrine broke
In different Schools: the bold poetic phrase
Of figured Plato; Zenophon's pure strain,
Like the clear brook that steals along the vale;
| Dissecting truth, the Stagyrite's keen eye;
The exalted Stoic pride; the Cynic sneer;
The slow-consenting Academic doubt;
And, joining bliss to virtue, the glad ease
Of Epicurus, seldom understood
They, ever candid, reason still opposed
To reason; and, since virtue was their aim,
Each by sure practice tried to prove his way

The lessening prospect, and the mountain blue,
Vanish'd in air; the precipice frown'd, dire;
White, down the rock, the rushing torrent dash'd;
The sun shone, trembling, o'er the distant main;
The tempest foam'd, immense; the driving storm
Sadden'd the skies, and, from the doubling gloom,
On the scathed oak the ragged lightning fell;
In closing shades, and where the current strays,
With Peace, and Love, and innocence around,
Piped the lone shepherd to his feeding flock:
Round happy parents smiled their younger selves;
And friends conversed, by death divided long

"To public virtue thus the smiling arts,
Unblemish'd handmaids, served; the Graces they
To dress this fairest Venus. Thus revered,
And placed beyond the reach of sordid care,
The high awarders of immortal fame, · ♬♪
Alone for glory thy great masters strove;=
Courted by kings, and by contending states
Assumed the boasted honour of their birth,
"In architecture too thy rank supreme!
That art where most magnificent appears
The little builder man; by thee refined,
And, smiling high, to full perfection brought.
Such thy sure rules, that Goths of every age,
Who scorn'd their aid, have only loaded earth
With labour'd heavy monuments of shame.
Not those gay domes that o'er thy splendid shore
Shot, all proportion, up. First unadorn'd,
And nobly plain, the manly Doric rose;
The Ionic then, with decent matron grace,
Her airy pillar heaved; luxuriant last,
The rich Corinthian spread her wanton wreath.
The whole so measured true, so lessen'd off
By fine proportion, that the marble pile,
Form'd to repel the still or stormy waste
Of rolling ages, light as fabrics look'd
That from the magic wand aërial rise.

"These were the wonders that illumined
Greece,

From end to end"-Here interrupting warm,
"Where are they now? (I cried) say, goddess,
where?

And what the land, thy darling thus of old?"
"Sunk! (she resumed) deep in the kindred gloom
Of superstition, and of slavery, sunk!

No glory now can touch their hearts, benumb'd
By loose dejected sloth and servile fear:
No science pierce the darkness of their minds;
No nobler art the quick ambitious soul
Of imitation in their breast awake.
E'en to supply the needful arts of life,
Mechanic toil denies the hopeless hand.
Scarce any trace remaining, vestige gray,
Or nodding column on the desert shore,
To point where Corinth, or where Athens stood.
A faithless land of violence, and death!
Where commerce parleys, dubious, on the shore;
And his wild impulse curious search restrains,

Afraid to trust the inhospitable clime.
Neglected nature fails; in sordid want
Sunk and debased, their beauty beams no more.
The sun himself seems, angry, to regard,
Of light unworthy, the degenerate race;
And fires them oft with pestilential rays:
While earth, blue poison steaming on the skies,
Indignant, shakes them from her troubled sides.
But as from man to man, Fate's first decree,
Impartial death the tide of riches rolls,
So states must die and Liberty go round.
"Fierce was the stand, ere Virtue, Valour,
Arts,

And the soul fired by me (that often, stung
With thoughts of better times and old renown,
From hydra-tyrants tried to clear the land)
Lay quite extinct in Greece, their works effaced
And gross o'er all unfeeling bondage spread.
Sooner I moved my much reluctant flight,
Poised on the doubtful wing: when Greece with
Greece

Embroil'd in foul contention fought no more
For common glory, and for common weal:
But false to Freedom, sought to quell the free;
Broke the firm band of Peace, and sacred Love,
That lent the whole irrefragable force;
And, as around the partial trophy blush'd,
Prepared the way for total overthrow.
Then to the Persian power, whose pride they
scorn'd,

When Xerxes pour'd his millions o'er the land,
Sparta, by turns, and Athens, vilely sued;
Sued to be venal parricides, to spill

Their country's bravest blood, and on themselves
To turn their matchless mercenary arms.
Peaceful in Susa, then, sat the Great King;*
And by the trick of treaties, the still waste
Of sly corruption, and barbaric gold,
Effected what his steel could ne'er perform.
Profuse he gave them the luxurious draught,
Inflaming all the land: unbalanced wide
Their tottering states; their wild assemblies ruled,
As the winds turn at every blast the seas:
And by their listed orators, whose breath
Still with a factious storm infested Greece,
Roused them to civil war, or dash'd them down
To sordid peace-Peace !t that, when Sparta
shook

Astonish'd Artaxerxes on his throne,
Gave up, fair-spread o'er Asia's sunny shore,
Their kindred cities to perpetual chains.
What could so base, so infamous a thought
In Spartan hearts inspire? Jealous, they saw

So the kings of Persia were called by the Greeks.

The peace made by Antalcidas, the Lacedemonian admiral, with the Persians; by which the Lacedemonians abandoned all the Greeks established in the lesser Asia, to the dominion of the King of Persia.

Respiring Athens* rear again her walls:
And the pale fury fired them, once again
To crush this rival city to the dust.
For now no more the noble social soul
Of Liberty my families combined;

But by short views, and selfish passions, broke,
Dire as when friends are rankled into foes,
They mix'd severe, and waged eternal war:
Nor felt they, furious, their exhausted force;
Nor, with false glory, discord, madness blind,
Saw how the blackening storm from Thracia came.
Long years roll'd on,† by many a battle stain'd,
The blush and boast of Fame! where courage, art,
And military glory shone supreme:
But let detesting ages, from the scene

Of Greece self-mangled, turn the sickening eye.
At last, when bleeding from a thousand wounds,
She felt her spirits fail, and in the dust
Her latest heroes, Nicias, Conon, lay,
Agesilaus, and the Theban friends:
The Macedonian vulture mark'd his time,
By the dire scent of Cheronæas lured,
And, fierce descending, seized his hapless prey.
"Thus tame submitted to the victor's yoke
Greece, once the gay, the turbulent, the bold;
For every grace, and muse, and science born;
With arts of War, of Government, elate;
To tyrants dreadful, dreadful to the best;
Whom I myself could scarcely rule: and thus
The Persian fetters, that inthrall'd the mind,
Were turn'd to formal and apparent chains.

"Unless Corruption first deject the pride,
And guardian vigour of the free-born soul,
All crude attempts of violence are vain;
For firm within, and while at heart untouch'd,
Ne'er yet by force was freedom overcome.
But soon as Independence stoops the head,
To Vice enslaved, and vice-created wants;
Then to some foul corrupting hand, whose waste
These heighten'd wants with fatal bounty feeds:
From man to man the slackening ruin runs,
Till the whole state unnerved in Slavery sinks.'

PART III.

ROME.

CONTENTS.

As this part contains a description of the establishment of Liberty in Rome, it begins with a view of the Grecian Colonies settled in the southern parts of Italy, which with Sicily constituted the Great Greece of the Ancients. With these colonies, the Spirit of Liberty and of Republics, spreads over

⚫ Athens had been dismantled by the Lacedemonians, at

Italy. Transition to Pythagoras and his philosophy, which he taught through those free states and cities. Amidst the many small Republics in Italy, Rome the destined seat of Liberty. Her establishment there dated from the expulsion of the Tarquins. How differing from that in Greece. Reference to a view of the Roman Republic given in the First Part of this Poem: to mark its Rise and Fall the peculiar purport of this. During its first ages, the greatest force of Liberty and Virtue exerted. The source whence derived the Heroic Virtues of the Romans. Enumeration of these Virtues. Thence their security at home; their glory, success, and empire abroad. Bounds of the Roman empire geographically described. The states of Greece restored to Liberty, by Titus Quintus Flaminius, the highest instance of public generosity and beneficence. The loss of Liberty in Rome. Its causes,

progress, and completion in the death of Brutus. Rome under

the emperors.

From Rome the Goddess of Liberty goes among the Northern Nations; where, by infusing into them her Spirit and general principles, she lays the groundwork of her future establishments; sends them in vengeance on the Roman empire, now totally enslaved; and then, with Arts and Sciences in her train, quits earth during the dark ages. The celestial regions, to which Liberty retired, not proper to be opened to the view of mortals.

HERE melting mixed with air the ideal forms
That painted still whate'er the goddess sung.
Then I, impatient. From extinguish'd Greece,
To what new region stream'd the Human Day?'
She softly sighing, as when Zephyr leaves;
Resign'd to Boreas, the declining year,
Resumed. Indignant, these last scenes I fled:*
And long ere then, Leucadia's cloudy cliff,
And the Ceraunian hills behind me thrown,
All Latium stood aroused. Ages before,
Great mother of republics! Greece had pour'd,
Swarm after swarm, her ardent youth around.
On Asia, Afric, Sicily, they stoop'd,
But chief on fair Hesperia's winding shore;
Where, from Laciniumt to Etrurian vales,
They roll'd increasing colonics along,
And lent materials for my Roman reign.
With them my spirit spread; and numerous states,
And cities rose, on Grecian models formed;
As its parental policy and arts
Each had imbibed. Besides, to each assign'd
A guardian Genius, o'er the public weal,
Kept an unclosing eye; tried to sustain,
Or more sublime, the soul infused by me:
And strong the battle rose, with various wave,
Against the tyrant demons of the land.
Thus they their little wars and triumphs knew;
Their flows of fortune, and receding times,
But almost all below the proud regard
Of story vow'd to Rome, on deeds intent
That truth beyond the flight of Fable bore.
'Not so the Samian sage;t to him belongs
The brightest witness of recording Fame.

the end of the first Peloponnesian war, and was at this time For these free states his native isles forsook,

restored by Conon to its former splendour.

f The Peloponnesian war.

Pelopidas and Epaminondas.

$ The battle of Cheronæa, in which Philip of Macedon ut

terly defeated the Greeks.

• The last struggles of Liberty in Greece.

A promontory in Calabria.

+ Pythagoras

§ Samos, over which then reigned the tyrant Polycrates.