ODE TO FRANCE.

FEBRUARY, 1848.

I.

As, flake by flake, the beetling avalanches

Build

up their imminent crags of noiseless snow,

Till some chance thrill the loosened ruin launches
And the blind havoc leaps unwarned below,
So grew and gathered through the silent years
The madness of a People, wrong by wrong.

There seemed no strength in the dumb toiler's tears,

No strength in suffering; but the Past was strong:

The brute despair of trampled centuries

Leaped up with one hoarse yell and snapped its bands, Groped for its right with horny, callous hands, And stared around for God with bloodshot eyes.

What wonder if those palms were all too hard

They whose thick atmosphere no bard

Had shivered with the lightning of his song,
Brutes with the memories and desires of men,
Whose chronicles were writ, with iron pen,

In the crooked shoulder and the forehead low
Set wrong to balance wrong,

And physicked woe with woe?

II.

They did as they were taught; not theirs the blame,
If men who scattered fire-brands reaped the flame :
They trampled Peace beneath their savage feet,
And by her golden tresses drew

Mercy along the pavement of the street.
O, Freedom! Freedom! is thy morning-dew
So gory red? Alas, thy light had ne'er
Shone in upon the chaos of their lair!

They reared to thee such symbol as they knew,
And worshipped it with flame and blood, -
A Vengeance, axe in hand, that stood

Holding a tyrant's head up by the clotted hair.

III.

What wrongs the Oppressor suffered, these we know ;

These have found piteous voice in song and prose; But for the Oppressed, their darkness and their woe,

Their grinding centuries, what Muse had those?

Though hall and palace had nor eyes nor ears,

Hardening a people's heart to senseless stone,

Thou knewest them, O Earth, that drank their tears, O Heaven, that heard their inarticulate moan! They noted down their fetters, link by link;

Coarse was the hand that scrawled, and red the ink;

Rude was their score, as suits unlettered men, Notched with a headsman's axe upon a block: What marvel if, when came the avenging shock,

'T was Ate, not Urania, held the pen?

IV.

With eye averted and an anguished frown,
Loathingly glides the Muse through scenes of strife,
Where, like the heart of Vengeance up and down,
Throbs in its framework the blood-muffled knife;

Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feet

Turn never backward: hers no bloody glare;

Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet,
And where it enters there is no despair :
Not first on palace and cathedral-spire

Quivers and gleams that unconsuming fire;
While these stand black against her morning skies,

The peasant sees it leap from peak to peak

Along his hills; the craftsman's burning eyes
Own with cool tears its influence mother-meek;
It lights the poet's heart up like a star;
Ah! while the tyrant deemed it still afar,
And twined with golden threads his futile snare,
That swift, convicting glow all round him ran;

'T was close beside him there,

Sunrise whose Memnon is the soul of man.

V.

O Broker-King, is this thy wisdom's fruit?
A dynasty plucked out as 't were a weed
Grown rankly in a night, that leaves no seed!
Could eighteen years strike down no deeper root?

But now thy vulture eye was turned on Spain,

A shout from Paris, and thy crown falls off,
Thy race has ceased to reign,

And thou become a fugitive and scoff:

Slippery the feet that mount by stairs of gold, And weakest of all fences one of steel;

Go and keep school again like him of old,

The Syracusan tyrant;

thou mayst feel

Royal amid a birch-swayed commonweal!

VI.

Not long can he be ruler who allows

His time to run before him; thou wast naught

Soon as the strip of gold about thy brows

Was no more emblem of the People's thought:

Vain were thy bayonets against the foe

Thou hadst to cope with; thou didst wage

War not with Frenchmen merely ; ·

- no,

Thy strife was with the Spirit of the Age, The invisible Spirit whose first breath divine

Scattered thy frail endeavour,

And, like poor last year's leaves, whirled thee and

thine

Into the Dark for ever!