Thou youngest giant birth Which from the groaning earth Leap'st, clothed in armour of impenetrable scale! Last of the Intercessors!
Who‘ gainst the Crowned Transgressors Pleadest before God's love! Arrayed in Wisdom's mail, Wave thy lightning lance in mirth Nor let thy high heart fail,
Though from their hundred gates the leagued Oppressors With hurried legions move! Hail, hail, all hail! What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme
Freedom and thee? thy shield is as a mirror To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer; A new Actaeon's error
Shall theirs have been — devoured by their own hounds! Be thou like the imperial Basilisk Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds! Gaze on Oppression, till at that dread risk
Aghast she pass from the Earth's disk: Fear not, but gaze — for freemen mightier grow, And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe:— If Hope, and Truth, and Justice may avail,
Thou shalt be great — All hail! From Freedom's form divine, From Nature's inmost shrine, Strip every impious gawd, rend
Error veil by veil; O'er Ruin desolate, O'er Falsehood's fallen state, Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale!
And equal laws be thine, And winged words let sail, Freighted with truth even from the throne of God: That wealth, surviving fate,
Be thine.— All hail! Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paean From land to land re-echoed solemnly, Till silence became music? From the Aeaean
To the cold Alps, eternal Italy Starts to hear thine! The Sea Which paves the desert streets of Venice laughs In light, and music; widowed Genoa wan
By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs, Murmuring,‘ Where is Doria?’ fair Milan, Within whose veins long ran The viper's palsying venom, lifts her heel
To bruise his head. The signal and the seal ( If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail ) Art thou of all these hopes.— O hail!
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