You said: "Since so it is, good-bye,
Sweet life, high hope; but whatsoe'er
May be, or must, no tongue shall dare
To tell, 'The Lombard feared to die!""

You said (there shall be answer fit):
"And if our children must obey,
They must; but, thinking on this day,
"Twill less debase them to submit."

You said (O not in vain you said):
"Haste, brothers, haste, while yet we may;
The hours ebb fast of this one day,
While blood may yet be nobly shed."

Ah! not for idle hatred, not
For honor, fame, nor self-applause,
But for the glory of the cause,
You did what will not be forgot.

And though the stranger stand, 'tis true,
By force and fortune's right he stands:
By fortune, which is in God's hands,
And strength, which yet shall spring in you.

This voice did on my spirit fall,
Peschiera, when thy bridge I crost:
""Tis better to have fought and lost
Than never to have fought at all."

Or shall I say: "Vain word, false thought, Since Prudence hath her martyrs too, And Wisdom dictates not to do

Till doing shall be not for naught?

"Not ours to give or lose is life:
Will Nature, when her brave ones fall,
Remake her work? or songs recall

Death's victim slain in useless strife?"

That rivers flow into the sea

Is loss and waste, the foolish say,
Nor know that back they find their way,
Unseen, to where they wont to be.

Showers fall upon the hills, springs flow, The river runneth still at hand,

Brave men are born into the land,

And whence, the foolish do not know.

No! no vain voice did on me fall,
Peschiera, when thy bridge I crost:
"Tis better to have fought and lost
Than never to have fought at all.”

CLOUGH (Peschiera).

78

THEN a deed is done for Freedom, through

W the

the broad earth's aching breast

Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,

And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb

To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime

Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the stormy stem of Time.

For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along,

Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong;

Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Humanity's vast frame

Through its ocean-sundered fibres feels the gush of joy or shame :

In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,

Parts the goats upon the left hand and the sheep upon the right,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record

One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.