Ha! how the murmur deepens!  I perceive
And tremble at its dreadful import.  Earth
Uplifts a general cry for guilt and wrong,
And heaven is listening.  The forgotten graves
Of the heart-broken utter forth their plaint. 
The dust of her who loved and was betrayed,
And him who died neglected in his age;
The sepulchres of those who for mankind
Laboured, and earned the recompense of scorn;
Ashes of martyrs for the truth, and bones
Of those who, in the strife for liberty,
Were beaten down, their corses given to dogs,
Their names to infamy, all find a voice. 
The nook in which the captive, overtoiled,
Lay down to rest at last, and that which holds
Childhood’s sweet blossoms, crushed by cruel hands,
Send up a plaintive sound.  From battle-fields,
Where heroes madly drave and dashed their hosts
Against each other, rises up a noise,
As if the armed multitudes of dead
Stirred in their heavy slumber.  Mournful tones
Come from the green abysses of the sea—­
story of the crimes the guilty sought
To hide beneath its waves.  The glens, the groves,
Paths in the thicket, pools of running brook,
And banks and depths of lake, and streets and lanes
Of cities, now that living sounds are hushed,
Murmur of guilty force and treachery.

Here, where I rest, the vales of Italy
Are round me, populous from early time,
And field of the tremendous warfare waged
’Twixt good and evil.  Who, alas, shall dare
Interpret to man’s ear the mingled voice
That comes from her old dungeons yawning now
To the black air, her amphitheatres,
Where the dew gathers on the mouldering stones,
And fanes of banished gods, and open tombs,
And roofless palaces, and streets and hearths
Of cities dug from their volcanic graves? 
I hear a sound of many languages,
The utterance of nations now no more,
Driven out by mightier, as the days of heaven
Chase one another from the sky.  The blood
Of freemen shed by freemen, till strange lords
Came in the hour of weakness, and made fast
The yoke that yet is worn, cries out to Heaven.

What then shall cleanse thy bosom, gentle Earth
From all its painful memories of guilt? 
The whelming flood, or the renewing fire,
Or the slow change of time? that so, at last,
The horrid tale of perjury and strife,
Murder and spoil, which men call history,
May seem a fable, like the inventions told
By poets of the gods of Greece.  O thou,
Who sittest far beyond the Atlantic deep,
Among the sources of thy glorious streams,
My native Land of Groves! a newer page
In the great record of the world is thine;
Shall it be fairer?  Fear, and friendly hope,
And envy, watch the issue, while the lines,
By which thou shalt be judged, are written down.

THE KNIGHT’S EPITAPH.