 | Fra Cipolla, and other poems |  |
Thus she commands, and well obeys the sprite
The hests imperious of her mystic might:
From Gaul's green vineyards, from the Belgic plains,
Now calls the many to cast off their chains:
Now helps some prophet, whom they think the true,
By force or fraud to forge them all anew.
Once for religion blood obscured the sun,
But now the wise are liberal, or for none;
Alike run mad for this, or t'other cause,
As Proteus changes rush the world to wars.
What, though the peasant, doomed afar to roam,
Weep his burnt field, and desecrated home;
The ruined merchant mourn his useless store,
Locked up by strife, with famine at the door;
The silent palace, with its nobles fled,
The herbless earth, the black and smouldering shed,
The extinguished hearth, by rapine lonely made,
Despair, suspicion of itself afraid,
That sits a cloud in childhood's thoughtful eye,
And watches ever, lest a foot be nigh,
And every form of death, and every woe
That fate can bring, or frenzy can bestow;
Oh what are these to philosophic mind,
To rule the world, and reconstruct designed?
Light in that lofty reasoner's scale are they,
“To-morrow's sun will smile them all away,”
But with that morrow, still another storm,
To some of ruin tells, and some, reform.
The hests imperious of her mystic might:
From Gaul's green vineyards, from the Belgic plains,
Now calls the many to cast off their chains:
Now helps some prophet, whom they think the true,
By force or fraud to forge them all anew.
Once for religion blood obscured the sun,
But now the wise are liberal, or for none;
108
As Proteus changes rush the world to wars.
What, though the peasant, doomed afar to roam,
Weep his burnt field, and desecrated home;
The ruined merchant mourn his useless store,
Locked up by strife, with famine at the door;
The silent palace, with its nobles fled,
The herbless earth, the black and smouldering shed,
The extinguished hearth, by rapine lonely made,
Despair, suspicion of itself afraid,
That sits a cloud in childhood's thoughtful eye,
And watches ever, lest a foot be nigh,
And every form of death, and every woe
That fate can bring, or frenzy can bestow;
Oh what are these to philosophic mind,
To rule the world, and reconstruct designed?
Light in that lofty reasoner's scale are they,
“To-morrow's sun will smile them all away,”
But with that morrow, still another storm,
To some of ruin tells, and some, reform.
| Fra Cipolla, and other poems | |