When, anxious long, the lightened mind
Lays down its load of care at last;

When, tired with toil o'er land and deep,
Again we tread the welcome floor
Of our own home, and sink to sleep
On the long-wished-for bed once more.

This, this it is, that pays alone

The ills of all life's former track.
Shine out, my beautiful, my own
Sweet Sirmio! greet thy master back.

And thou, fair lake, whose water quaffs
The light of heaven like Lydia's sea,
Rejoice, rejoice, let all that laughs
Abroad, at home, laugh out for me.

Catullus. Tr. Thomas Moore.

A

Sicily.

SICILY.

LAS for Sicily! rude fragments now

Lie scattered, where the shapely column stood. Her palaces are dust. In all her streets The voice of singing and the sprightly chord Are silent. Revelry and dance and show Suffer a syncope and a solemn pause,

While God performs upon the trembling stage
Of his own works his dreadful part alone.

How does the earth receive him? — with what signs
Of gratulation and delight her king?

Pours she not all her choicest fruits abroad,
Her sweetest flowers, her aromatic gums,
Disclosing Paradise where'er he treads?

She quakes at his approach. Her hollow womb,
Conceiving thunders through a thousand deeps
And fiery caverns, roars beneath his foot.

The hills move lightly, and the mountains smoke,
For he has touched them. From the extremest point
Of elevation down into the abyss

His wrath is busy, and his frown is felt.

The rocks fall headlong, and the valleys rise,

The rivers die into offensive pools,

And charged with putrid verdure, breathe a gross
And mortal nuisance into all the air.

What solid was, by transformation strange,
Grows fluid; and the fixed and rooted earth,
Tormented into billows, heaves and swells,
Or with vortiginous and hideous whirl
Sucks down its prey insatiable. Immense
The tumult and the overthrow, the pangs
And agonies of human and of brute
Multitudes, fugitive on every side,
And fugitive in vain. The sylvan scene
Migrates uplifted; and, with all its soil
Alighting in far distant fields, finds out
A new possessor, and survives the change.
Ocean has caught the frenzy, and, upwrought

To an enormous and o'erbearing height,
Not by a mighty wind, but by that voice
Which winds and waves obey, invades the shore
Resistless. Never such a sudden flood,

Upridged so high, and sent on such a charge,
Possessed an inland scene. Where now the throng
That pressed the beach, and, hasty to depart,
Looked to the sea for safety? They are gone,
Gone with the refluent wave into the deep, —
A prince with half his people! Ancient towers,
And roofs embattled high, the gloomy scenes,
Where beauty oft and lettered worth consume
Life in the unproductive shades of death,
Fall prone the pale inhabitants come forth,
And, happy in their unforeseen release
From all the rigors of restraint, enjoy

The terrors of the day, that sets them free.
Who, then, that has thee would not hold thee fast,
Freedom? whom they that lose thee so regret,
That e'en a judgment, making way for thee,
Seems in their eyes a mercy for thy sake.

William Cowper.

N°

ODE TO SICILY.

mortal hand hath struck the heroic string Siuce Milton's lay in death across his breast, But shall the lyre then rest

Along tired Cupid's wing

With vilest dust upon it? This of late
Hath been its fate.

But thou, O Sicily, art born agen.

Far over chariot's and Olympic steeds

I see the heads and the stout arms of men,

And will record (God give me power!) their deeds.

Hail to thee first, Palermo! hail to thee

Who callest with loud voice,

"Arise! be free;

Weak is the hand and rusty is the chain."
Thou callest; nor in vain.

Not only from the mountain rushes forth
The knighthood of the North,

In whom my soul elate

Owns now a race cognate,

But even the couch of sloth mid painted walls Swells up, and men start forth from it, where calls The voice of Honor, long, too long, unheard.

Not that the wretch was feared

Who feared the meanest as he feared the best
(A reed could break his rest),
But that around all kings
Forever springs

A wasting vapor that absorbs the fire
Of all that would rise higher.

Even free nations will not let there be
More nations free.

Witness (O shame!) our own

Of eight years viler none,

The second Charles found many and made more
Base as himself: his reign is not yet o'er.

To gratify a brood

Swamp-fed amid the Suabian wood,
The sons of Lusitania were cajoled,
And bound, and sold,

And sent in chains where we unchain the slave
We die with thirst to save.

Ye, too, Sicilians, ye too gave we up
To drain the bitter cup

Ye now dash from ye in the despot's face,
O glorious race,

Which Hiero, Gelon, Pindar, sat among,

And praised for weaker deeds in deathless song;
One is yet left to laud ye. Years have marred
My voice, my prelude for some better bard,
When such shall rise, and such your deeds create.

In the lone woods, and late,

Murmurs swell loud and louder, till at last
So strong the blast

That the whole forest, earth, and sea, and sky,
To the loud surge reply.

Show, in the circle of six hundred years,
Show me a Bourbon on whose brow appears
No brand of traitor. Prune the tree,

From the same stock, forever will there be
The same foul canker, the same bitter fruit.
Strike, Sicily, uproot

The cursed upas. Never trust

That race agen; down with it, dust to dust.

Walter Savage Landor.