VIII.

Athens of Italy!-I gaze on thee

From Miniato's cypress-covered steep;

Florence! beneath me spread, how drowsily

Thou liest 'midst thy rich olive groves in sleep: Round thy grey towers the veil-like vapours sweep, Making thy beauty indistinct, more fair:

Hark! sounds of life their equal measure keep:

The deep-toned bell throws music on the air:

The pulse of one vast heart throbs audibly upwards

there!

IX.

Thou, who dost love thy human-kind, who feelest

Thou art in bonds of brotherhood allied,

When from the crowd to solitude thou stealest,

Waste not thy passion by the mountain-side,

Go-gaze upon a City in its pride!

Then shalt thou prove thine own humanity :
He, the Immortal, who for mortals died,

Here first felt human tears-here, heaved the sigh,
As man with all his failings lived before his eye.

X.

Hark-how the hum of men in distance heard,

Makes the live silence felt along the air!
Yet all of Chaos' elements are stirred

In the fierce soul of man contending there:
What passions agitate, what feelings wear
His frame away before its time, which end

In deeds, whose fruits are ashes and despair:

In thoughts, which through a shoreless future tend:

In dust, that mocks the will which would with fate

contend.

XI.

Frail plaything of the hour! yet there he toils

For life, as if the feverish dream could last;

And, though the weight of truth on him recoils,
His pride still rallies when the fit is past:

The metamorphoses of life fled fast,

And dream-like,-youth and age-he stands alone, And Wisdom now her rays might on him cast;

But slave to sense and habit he is grown:

His soul's once ardent hopes are withered, dead, or flown.

XII.

O thou loved land which still art Paradise!

Thou that embodiest all the Poets dream!

Thou, that art bathed, as in a fount, by skies
Of Heaven's own tincture; where the golden gleam
Of sunlight gilds thy every flower and stream,
Bright as the rays which call them into birth!

Where the corn, vine, and olive, laughing, teem:
Where the broad rivers roll in voiceful mirth :

And where the Titan-Alp girds thee from common earth.

And boundless mirror of the Almighty's throne;

Pure as the eyes of holiest Innocence,

When opening on the heaven which is her own.

Beneath-what prodigality is shown,

Where waste is rank luxuriance that dies

Over its heaped profusion; where the zone

Of Love unbound embraces earth and skies;

O'er which the sweet South sheds its breath of eloquent

sighs.

XIV.

Thou azure-eyed and laughing Italy!
Nature hath stamped a magic in thy smile:

The Syren sweetness living in thine eye,

Could all but Barbarism's heart beguile;

No marvel, conquerors owned, at last, thy wile; Oh! had they paused in their first wrath one hour, Thou hadst prevailed, and quench'd thy ruin's pile; Mind o'er brute passion had assumed its power: And beauty, spared by time, had been thy priceless dower.

XV.

Away the weak lament which for thee mourns!

All ill is fleeting-Good alone stands fast:

First freedom, fame, then luxury returns,

Decline and fall, but liberty at last;

Thy chains shall be to earth forgotten cast:

Thy Beauty, which has been thy curse, shall then

Become the sweet Avenger of the past:

Nations whom thou hast humanised to men,

Shall raise thee from the dust, and own thy powers

again.

XVI.

Enter yon street of palaces and towers:
Here Circe calls the wanderer to stay,

And Pleasure laughs away the flying hours:
Florence! thy ducal race have passed away,
But they have left behind them that bright ray
Of immortality which gilds the name

Of those scarce less than tyrants in their day:

Thy Medicis shall still our reverence claim:

To Art they reared a shrine, and gave themselves to fame.

XVII.

Parent or nurse of mightiest minds wert thou!
Souls formed above the common herd to soar:
Here Dante, entering Hell with prophet brow,
Left Hope, the seraph, sighing at its door!

Here Galileo's spirit from earth's shore,

Spread itself o'er the isled infinity,

Pilgrim to heavenly worlds unfound before;

Here Milton from " the top of Fiesolè,"

Or, while the Vallambrosian shades embowered from

high,