STROPHE 2.

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 70
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! 75
Hail, hail, all hail!

ANTISTROPHE 1a.

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; 80
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 85
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! 90

ANTISTROPHE 2a.

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, 95
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, 100
Be thine.—­All hail!

NOTE: 
100 wealth-surviving cj.  A.C.  Bradley.

ANTISTROPHE 1b.

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 105
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, 110
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! 115

NOTES: 
104 Aeaea, the island of Circe.—­[SHELLEY’S NOTE.]
112 The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti,
     tyrants of Milan.—­[SHELLEY’S NOTE.]

ANTISTROPHE 2b.