<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=478211" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Lines Written Among The Euganean Hills</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Many a green isle needs must be<br>In the deep wide sea of Misery,<br>Or the mariner, worn and wan,<br>Never thus could voyage on - <br>Day and night, and night and day,<br>Drifting on his dreary way,<br>With the solid darkness black<br>Closing round his vessel's track:<br>Whilst above the sunless sky,<br>Big with clouds, hangs heavily,<br>And behind the tempest fleet<br>Hurries on with lightning feet,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He is ever drifted on<br>O'er the unreposing wave<br>To the haven of the grave.<br>What, if there no friends will greet;<br>What, if there no heart will meet<br>His with love's impatient beat;<br>Wander wheresoe'er he may,<br>Can he dream before that day<br>To find refuge from distress<br>In friendship's smile, in love's caress?<br>Then 'twill wreak him little woe<br>Whether such there be or no:<br>Senseless is the breast, and cold,<br>Which relenting love would fold;<br>Bloodless are the veins and chill<br>Which the pulse of pain did fill;<br>Every little living nerve<br>That from bitter words did swerve<br>Round the tortured lips and brow,<br>Are like sapless leaflets now<br>Frozen upon December's bough.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">On the beach of a northern sea<br>Which tempests shake eternally,<br>As once the wretch there lay to sleep,<br>Lies a solitary heap,<br>One white skull and seven dry bones,<br>On the margin of the stones,<br>Where a few grey rushes stand,<br>Boundaries of the sea and land:<br>Nor is heard one voice of wail<br>But the sea-mews, as they sail<br>O'er the billows of the gale;<br>Or the whirlwind up and down<br>Howling, like a slaughtered town,<br>When a king in glory rides<br>Through the pomp and fratricides:<br>Those unburied bones around<br>There is many a mournful sound;<br>There is no lament for him,<br>Like a sunless vapour, dim,<br>Who once clothed with life and thought<br>What now moves nor murmurs not.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ay, many flowering islands lie<br>In the waters of wide Agony:<br>To such a one this morn was led,<br>My bark by soft winds piloted:<br>'Mid the mountains Euganean<br>I stood listening to the paean<br>With which the legioned rooks did hail<br>The sun's uprise majestical;<br>Gathering round with wings all hoar,<br>Through the dewy mist they soar<br>Like gray shades, till the eastern heaven<br>Bursts, and then, as clouds of even,<br>Flecked with fire and azure, lie<br>In the unfathomable sky,<br>So their plumes of purple grain,<br>Starred with drops of golden rain,<br>Gleam above the sunlight woods,<br>As in silent multitudes<br>On the morning's fitful gale<br>Through the broken mist they sail,<br>And the vapours cloven and gleaming<br>Follow, down the dark steep streaming,<br>Till all is bright, and clear, and still,<br>Round the solitary hill.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Beneath is spread like a green sea<br>The waveless plain of Lombardy,<br>Bounded by the vaporous air,<br>Islanded by cities fair;<br>Underneath Day's azure eyes<br>Ocean's nursling, Venice, lies,<br>A peopled labyrinth of walls,<br>Amphitrite's destined halls,<br>Which her hoary sire now paves<br>With his blue and beaming waves.<br>Lo! the sun upsprings behind,<br>Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined<br>On the level quivering line<br>Of the waters crystalline;<br>And before that chasm of light,<br>As within a furnace bright,<br>Column, tower, and dome, and spire,<br>Shine like obelisks of fire,<br>Pointing with inconstant motion<br>From the altar of dark ocean<br>To the sapphire-tinted skies;<br>As the flames of sacrifice<br>From the marble shrines did rise,<br>As to pierce the dome of gold<br>Where Apollo spoke of old.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Sea-girt City, thou hast been<br>Ocean's child, and then his queen;<br>Now is come a darker day,<br>And thou soon must be his prey,<br>If the power that raised thee here<br>Hallow so thy watery bier.<br>A less drear ruin then than now,<br>With thy conquest-branded brow<br>Stooping to the slave of slaves<br>From thy throne, among the waves<br>Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew<br>Flies, as once before it flew,<br>O'er thine isles depopulate,<br>And all is in its ancient state,<br>Save where many a palace gate<br>With green sea-flowers overgrown<br>Like a rock of Ocean's own,<br>Topples o'er the abandoned sea<br>As the tides change sullenly.<br>The fisher on his watery way,<br>Wandering at the close of day,<br>Will spread his sail and seize his oar<br>Till he pass the gloomy shore,<br>Lest thy dead should, from their sleep<br>Bursting o'er the starlight deep,<br>Lead a rapid masque of death<br>O'er the waters of his path.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Those who alone thy towers behold<br>Quivering through aereal gold,<br>As I now behold them here,<br>Would imagine not they were<br>Sepulchres, where human forms,<br>Like pollution-nourished worms,<br>To the corpse of greatness cling,<br>Murdered, and now mouldering:<br>But if Freedom should awake<br>In her omnipotence and shake<br>From the Celtic Anarch's hold<br>All the keys of dungeons cold,<br>Where a hundred cities lie<br>Chained like thee, ingloriously,<br>Thou and all thy sister band<br>Might adorn this sunny land,<br>Twining memories of old time<br>With new virtues more sublime;<br>If not, perish thou and they! - <br>Clouds which stain truth's rising day<br>By her sun consumed away - <br>Earth can spare ye; while like flowers,<br>In the waste of years and hours,<br>From your dust new nations spring<br>With more kindly blossoming.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Perish -let there only be<br>Floating o'er thy heartless sea<br>As the garment of thy sky<br>Clothes the world immortally,<br>One remembrance, more sublime<br>Than the tattered pall of time,<br>Which scarce hides thy visage wan; - <br>That a tempest-cleaving Swan<br>Of the sons of Albion,<br>Driven from his ancestral streams<br>By the might of evil dreams,<br>Found a nest in thee; and Ocean<br>Welcomed him with such emotion<br>That its joy grew his, and sprung<br>From his lips like music flung<br>O'er a mighty thunder-fit,<br>Chastening terror: -what though yet<br>Poesy's unfailing River,<br>Which through Albion winds forever<br>Lashing with melodious wave<br>Many a sacred Poet's grave,<br>Mourn its latest nursling fled?<br>What though thou with all thy dead<br>Scarce can for this fame repay<br>Aught thine own? oh, rather say<br>Though thy sins and slaveries foul<br>Overcloud a sunlike soul?<br>As the ghost of Homer clings<br>Round Scamander's wasting springs;<br>As divinest Shakespeare's might<br>Fills Avon and the world with light<br>Like omniscient power which he<br>Imaged 'mid mortality;<br>As the love from Petrarch's urn,<br>Yet amid yon hills doth burn,<br>A quenchless lamp by which the heart<br>Sees things unearthly; -so thou art,<br>Mighty spirit -so shall be<br>The City that did refuge thee.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lo, the sun floats up the sky<br>Like thought-winged Liberty,<br>Till the universal light<br>Seems to level plain and height;<br>From the sea a mist has spread,<br>And the beams of morn lie dead<br>On the towers of Venice now,<br>Like its glory long ago.<br>By the skirts of that gray cloud<br>Many-domed Padua proud<br>Stands, a peopled solitude,<br>'Mid the harvest-shining plain,<br>Where the peasant heaps his grain<br>In the garner of his foe,<br>And the milk-white oxen slow<br>With the purple vintage strain,<br>Heaped upon the creaking wain,<br>That the brutal Celt may swill<br>Drunken sleep with savage will;<br>And the sickle to the sword<br>Lies unchanged, though many a lord,<br>Like a weed whose shade is poison,<br>Overgrows this region's foison,<br>Sheaves of whom are ripe to come<br>To destruction's harvest-home:<br>Men must reap the things they sow,<br>Force from force must ever flow,<br>Or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe<br>That love or reason cannot change<br>The despot's rage, the slave's revenge.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Padua, thou within whose walls<br>Those mute guests at festivals,<br>Son and Mother, Death and Sin,<br>Played at dice for Ezzelin,<br>Till Death cried, 'I win, I win!'<br>And Sin cursed to lose the wager,<br>But Death promised, to assuage her,<br>That he would petition for<br>Her to be made Vice-Emperor,<br>When the destined years were o'er,<br>Over all between the Po<br>And the eastern Alpine snow,<br>Under the mighty Austrian.<br>She smiled so as Sin only can,<br>And since that time, ay, long before,<br>Both have ruled from shore to shore, - <br>That incestuous pair, who follow<br>Tyrants as the sun the swallow,<br>As Repentance follows Crime,<br>And as changes follow Time.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In thine halls the lamp of learning,<br>Padua, now no more is burning;<br>Like a meteor, whose wild way<br>Is lost over the grave of day,<br>It gleams betrayed and to betray:<br>Once remotest nations came<br>To adore that sacred flame,<br>When it lit not many a hearth<br>On this cold and gloomy earth:<br>Now new fires from antique light<br>Spring beneath the wide world's might;<br>But their spark lies dead in thee,<br>Trampled out by Tyranny.<br>As the Norway woodman quells,<br>In the depth of piny dells,<br>One light flame among the brakes,<br>While the boundless forest shakes,<br>And its mighty trunks are torn<br>By the fire thus lowly born:<br>The spark beneath his feet is dead,<br>He starts to see the flames it fed<br>Howling through the darkened sky<br>With a myriad tongues victoriously,<br>And sinks down in fear: so thou,<br>O Tyranny, beholdest now<br>Light around thee, and thou hearest<br>The loud flames ascend, and fearest:<br>Grovel on the earth; ay, hide<br>In the dust thy purple pride!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Noon descends around me now:<br>'Tis the noon of autumn's glow,<br>When a soft and purple mist<br>Like a vapourous amethyst,<br>Or an air-dissolved star<br>Mingling light and fragrance, far<br>From the curved horizon's bound<br>To the point of Heaven's profound,<br>Fills the overflowing sky;<br>And the plains that silent lie<br>Underneath the leaves unsodden<br>Where the infant Frost has trodden<br>With his morning-winged feet,<br>Whose bright print is gleaming yet;<br>And the red and golden vines,<br>Piercing with their trellised lines<br>The rough, dark-skirted wilderness;<br>The dun and bladed grass no less,<br>Pointing from this hoary tower<br>In the windless air; the flower<br>Glimmering at my feet; the line<br>Of the olive-sandalled Apennine<br>In the south dimly islanded;<br>And the Alps, whose snows are spread<br>High between the clouds and sun;<br>And of living things each one;<br>And my spirit which so long<br>Darkened this swift stream of song, - <br>Interpenetrated lie<br>By the glory of the sky:<br>Be it love, light, harmony,<br>Odour, or the soul of all<br>Which from Heaven like dew doth fall,<br>Or the mind which feeds this verse<br>Peopling the lone universe.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Noon descends, and after noon<br>Autumn's evening meets me soon,<br>Leading the infantine moon,<br>And that one star, which to her<br>Almost seems to minister<br>Half the crimson light she brings<br>From the sunset's radiant springs:<br>And the soft dreams of the morn<br>(Which like winged winds had borne<br>To that silent isle, which lies<br>Mid remembered agonies,<br>The frail bark of this lone being)<br>Pass, to other sufferers fleeing,<br>And its ancient pilot, Pain,<br>Sits beside the helm again.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Other flowering isles must be<br>In the sea of Life and Agony:<br>Other spirits float and flee<br>O'er that gulf: even now, perhaps,<br>On some rock the wild wave wraps,<br>With folded wings they waiting sit<br>For my bark, to pilot it<br>To some calm and blooming cove,<br>Where for me, and those I love,<br>May a windless bower be built,<br>Far from passion, pain, and guilt,<br>In a dell mid lawny hills,<br>Which the wild sea-murmur fills,<br>And soft sunshine, and the sound<br>Of old forests echoing round,<br>And the light and smell divine<br>Of all flowers that breathe and shine:<br>We may live so happy there,<br>That the Spirits of the Air,<br>Envying us, may even entice<br>To our healing Paradise<br>The polluting multitude;<br>But their rage would be subdued<br>By that clime divine and calm,<br>And the winds whose wings rain balm<br>On the uplifted soul, and leaves<br>Under which the bright sea heaves;<br>While each breathless interval<br>In their whisperings musical<br>The inspired soul supplies<br>With its own deep melodies;<br>And the love which heals all strife<br>Circling, like the breath of life,<br>All things in that sweet abode<br>With its own mild brotherhood:<br>They, not it, would change; and soon<br>Every sprite beneath the moon<br>Would repent its envy vain,<br>And the earth grow young again.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Percy+Bysshe+Shelley">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=478211" data-title="Lines Written Among The Euganean Hills de Percy Bysshe Shelley" data-description="Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of Misery, Or the mariner, worn and wan, Never thus could voyage on - Day and night, and night and day, Drifting on his dreary way, With the solid darkness black Closing round his vessel's trac..."></div> </div> </div>

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