The Youth of England to Garibaldi's Legion

O ye who by the gaping earth

Where, faint with resurrection, lay
An empire struggling into birth,

Her storm-strown beauty cold with clay,
The free winds round her flowery head,
Her feet still rooted with the dead,

Leaned on the unconquered arms that clave
Her tomb like Judgment, and foreknew
The life for which you rent the grave,

Would rise to breathe, beam, beat for you,

In every pulse of passionate mood,

A people's glorious gratitude, —

But heard, far off, the mobled woe

Of some new plaintiff for the light;
And leave your dear reward, and go

In haste, yet once again to smite

'Those 1,067 Cacciatori, who, after conquering in the Lombard
campaign, set out, unassisted, and ' looking upon themselves as al-
ready dead' (vide Times), to complete, in face of a fleet and three
armies, the work of Italian emancipation.

The hills, and, like a flood, unlock
Another nation from the rock;

Oh ye who, sure of nought but God
And death, go forth to turn the page

Of life, and in your heart's best blood
Date anew the chaptered age;

Ye o'er whom, as the abyss

O'er Curtius, sundered worlds shall kiss,

Do ye dream what ye have done?

What ye are and shall be? Nay,
Comets rushing to the. sun,

And dyeing the tremendous way
With glory, look not back, nor know
How they blind the earth below.

From wave to wave our' race rolls on,

In seas that rise, and fall, and rise;
Our tide of Man beneath the moon

Sets from the verge to yonder skies;
Throb after throb the ancient might
In such a thousand hills renews the earliest height.

'Tis something, o'er that moving vast,

To look across the centuries
Which heave the purple of a past

That was, and is not, and yet is,
And in that awful light to see
The crest of far Thermopylae,

And, as a fisher draws his fly

Ripple by ripple, from shore to shore,

To draw our floating gaze, and try
The more by less, the less by more,

And find a peer to that sublime

Old height in the last surge of time.

'Tis something: yet great Clio's reed,
Greek with the sap of Castaly,
In her most glorious word midway

Begins to weep and bleed;

And Clio, lest she burn the line

Hides her blushing face divine,

While that maternal muse, so white
And lean with trying to forget,

Moves her mute lips, and, at the sight,
As if all suns that ever set

Slanted on a mortal ear

What man can feel but cannot hear,

We know, and know not how we know,
That when heroic Greece uprist,

Sicilia broke a daughter's vow,
And failed the inexorable tryst, —

We know that when those Spartans drew

Their swords — too many and too few! —

A presage blanched the Olympian hill
To moonlight: the old Thunderer nods;

But all the sullen air is chill
With rising Fates and younger gods.
Jove saw his peril and spake: one blind
Pale coward touched them with mankind.

What, then, on that Sicanian ground

Which soured the blood of Greece to shame,

To make the voice of praise resound
A triumph that, if Grecian fame
Blew it on her clarion old,

Had warmed the silver trump to gold!
What, then, brothers! to brim o'er

The measure Greece could scarcely brim,
And, calling Victory from the dim

Of that remote Thessalian shore,

Make his naked limbs repeat

What in the harness of defeat

He did of old; and, at the head
Of modern men, renewing thus
Thermopylae, with Xerxes fled
And every Greek Leonidas,
Untitle the proud Past and crown
The heroic ages in our own!

Oh ye, whom they who cry 'how long'
See, and — as nestlings in the nest
Sink silent — sink into their rest;
Oh ye, in whom the Right and Wrong
That this old world of Day and Night
Crops upon its black and white,

Shall strike, and, in the last extremes
Of final best and worst, complete
The circuit of your light and heat;

Oh ye who walk upon our dreams,

And live, unknowing how or why

The vision and the prophecy,

In every tabernacled tent —

Eat shew-bread from the altar, and wot
Not of it — drink a sacrament

At every draught and know it not —
Breathe a nobler year whose least
Worst day is as the fast and feast

Of men — and, with such steps as chime
To nothing lower than the ears
Can hear to whom the marching spheres

Beat the universal time

Thro' our Life's perplexity,

March the land and sail the sea,

O'er those fields where Hate hath led
So oft the hosts of Crime and Pain —
March to break the captive's chain,

To heal the sick, to raise the dead,

And, where the last deadliest rout

Of furies cavern, to cast out

Those Daemons, — ay, to meet the fell
Foul belch of swarming Satan hot
From Ætna, and down Ætna's throat
Drench that vomit back to hell —

In the east your star doth burn;

The tide of Fate is on the turn;

The thrown powers that mar or make
Man's good lie shed upon the sands,

Or on the wave about to break

Are flotsam that nor swims nor stands;

Earth is cold and pale, a-swoon

With fear; to the watch-tower of noon

The sun climbs sick and sorrowful,
Or, like clouded Caesar, doth fold
His falling greatness to behold

Some crescent evil near the full.

Hell flickers; and the sudden reel

Of fortune, stopping in mid-wheel
Till the shifted current blows,

Clacks the knocking balls of chance
And the metred world's advance
Pauses at the rhythmic close;
One stave is ended, and the next
Chords its discords on the vext

And tuning Time: this is the hour
When weak Nature's need should be
The Hero's opportunity,
And heart and hand are Right and Power,
And he who will not serve may reign,
And who dares well dares nought in vain.

Behind you History stands a-gape;
On either side the incarnadine
Hot nations in whom war's wild wine

Bums like vintage thro' the grape,

See you, ruddy with the morn

Of Freedom, see you, and for scorn

As on that old day of wrath
The hosts drew off in hope and doubt,
And the shepherd-boy stept out

To sling Judæa upon Gath,

Furl in two, and, still as stone,

Like a red sea let you on.

On! ay tho' at war's alarms

That sea should flood into a foe!

On! the horns of Jericho
Blow when Virtue blows to arms.
Numberless or numbered — on!
Men are millions, God is one.

On! who waits for favouring gales?

What hap can ground your Argosy?
A nation's blessings fill your sails,

And tho' her wrongs scorched ocean dry,
Yet ah! her blood and tears could roll
Another sea from pole to pole.

On! day round ye, summer bloom
Beneath, in your young veins the bliss
Of youth! Who asks more? Ask but this,

— And ask as One will ask at Doom —

If lead be true, if steel be keen?

If hearts be pure, if hands be clean?

On! night round ye, the worst roak
Of Fortune poisoning all youth's bliss;

Each grass a sword, each Delphic oak

An omen! Who dreads? Dread but this, —

Blunted steel and lead unsure,

Hands unclean and hearts impure!

Full of love to God and man
As girt Martha's wageless toil;
Gracious as the wine and oil
Of the good Samaritan;

Healing to our wrongs and us
As Abraham's breast to Lazarus;

Piteous as the cheek that gave
Its patience to the smiter, still
Rendering nought but good for ill,
Tho' the greatest good ye have
Be iron, and your love and ruth
Speak but from the cannon's mouth —

On! you servants of the Lord,

In the right of servitude
Reap the life He sowed, and blood
His frenzied people with the sword,
And the blessing shall be yours,
That falls upon the peacemakers!

Ay, tho' trump and clarion blare,
Tho' your charging legions rock
Earth's bulwarks, tho' the slaughtered air
Be carrion, and the encountered shock

Of your clashing battles jar

The rung heav'ns, this is Peace, not War

With that two-edged sword that cleaves

Crowned insolence to awe,
And whose backward lightning leaves

Licence stricken into law,
Fill, till slaves and tyrants cease,
The sacred panurgy of peace!

Peace, as outraged peace can rise
When her eye that watched and prayed

Sees upon the favouring skies
The great sign, so long delayed,

And from hoofed and trampled sod

She leaps transfigured to a god,

Meets amid her smoking land

The chariot of careering War,

Locks the whirlwind of his car,
Wrests the thunder from his hand,
And, with his own bolt down-hurl'd,
Brains the monster from the world I

Hark! he comes! His nostrils cast
Like chaff before him flocks and men.
Oh proud, proud day, in yonder glen
Look on your heroes! Look your last,
Your last: and draw in with .the passionate eye
Of love's last look the sights that paint eternity.

He comes — a tempest hides their place!
'Tis morn. The long day wanes. The loud
Storm lulls. Some march out of the cloud.
The princes of their age and race;

And some the mother earth that bore
Such sons hath loved too well to let them leave
her more.

But oh, when joy-bells ring

For the living that return,

And the fires of victory burn,
And the dancing kingdoms sing,
And beauty takes the brave
To the breast he bled to save,

Will no faithful mourner weep

Where the battle-grass is gory,
And deep the soldier's sleep

In his martial cloak of glory,
Sleeps the dear dead buried low?
Shall they be forgotten? Lo,

On beyond that vale of fire

This babe must travel ere the child

Of yonder tall and bearded sire
His father's image hath fulfilled,

He shall see in that far day

A race of maidens pale and grey.

Theirs shall be nor cross nor hood,

Common rite nor convent roof,

Bead nor bell shall put to proof
A sister of that sisterhood;
But by noonday or by night
In her eyes there shall be light.

And as a temple organ, set

To its best stop by hands long gone,
Gives new ears the olden tone

And speaks the buried master yet,

Her lightest accents have the key

Of ancient love and victory.

And, as some hind, whom his o'erthrown
And dying king o'er hill and flood
Sends laden with the fallen crown,

Breathes the great trust into his blood
Till all his conscious forehead wears
The splendid secret that he bears,

For ever, everywhere the same,
Thro' every changing time and scene,

In widow's weeds and lowly name
She stands a bride, she moves a queen

The flowering land her footstep knows;

The people bless her as she goes.

Whether upon your sacred days

She peers the mightiest and the best.

Or whether, by the common ways,
The babe leans from the peasant's breast,
While humble eyelids proudly fill,

And momentary Sabbaths still

The hand that spins, the foot that delves.
And all our sorrow and delight'

Behold the seraph of themselves

In that pure face where woe grown bright
Seems rapture chastened to the mild
And equal light of smiles unsmiled.

And if perchance some wandering king,
Enamoured of her virgin reign,

Should sue the hand whose only ring
Is the last link of that first chain,

Forged by no departed hours, and seen

But in the daylight that hath been,

She pauses ere her heart can speak,
And, from below the source of tears.

The girlhood to her faded cheek
Goes slowly up thro' twenty years,

And, like the shadow in her eyes,

Slowly the living Past replies,

In tones of such serene eclipse

As if the voices of Death and Life
Came married by her mortal lips

To more than Life or Death — ' A wife
Thou wooest; on yonder field he died
Who lives in all the world beside.'

Oh, ye who, in the favouring smile
Of Heaven, at one great stroke shall win

The gleaming guerdons that beguile
Glory's grey-haired Paladin

Thro' all his threescore jousts and ten,

— Love of women, and praise of men,

The spurs, the bays, the palm, the crown, —
Who, from your mountain-peak among

Mountains, thenceforth may look along
The shining tops of deeds undone,

And take them thro' the level air

As angels walk from star to star,

We from our isle — the ripest spot
Of the round green globe — where all
The rays of God most kindly fall,

And warm us to that temperate lot

Of seasoned change that slowly brings

Fruition to the orb of things,

We from this calm in chaos, where

Matter running into plan

And Reason solid in a man
Mediate the earth and air,
See ye winging yon far gloom,
Oh, ministering spirits! as some

Blest soul above that, all too late,
From his subaltern seat in heaven

Looks round and measures fate with fate,
And thro' the clouds below him driven

Beholds from that calm world of bliss

The toil and agony of this,

And, warming with the scene rehearst,
Bemoans the realms where all is won,

And sees the last that shall be first,
And spurns his secondary throne,

And envies from his changeless sphere

The life that strives and conquers here.
But ere toward fields so old and new
We leap from joys that shine in vain,

And rain our passion down the blue

Serene — once more — once more — to drain
Life's dreadful ecstasy, and sell
Our birthright for that oxymel
Whose stab and unction still keep quick
The wound for ever lost and found,

Lo, overhead, a cherubic
And legendary lyre, that round

The eddying spaces turns a dream

Of ancient war! And at the theme

Harps to answering harps, on high,
Call, recall, that but a strait
Of storm divides our happy state
From that pale sleepless Mystery
Who pines to sit upon the throne
He served ere falling to his own.