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(From Italy)
A GORGE cleft through the mountain’s mighty heart: | |
| Volcanic throes within her breast we hear, | |
| Or pent-up winds, or earth’s spasmodic start? | |
| No, ’t is the cleaving Terni’s wild career; | |
| On, where yon clouds like shrouded giants rear | 5 |
| Their shapes in azure distance, while the swell | |
| Of the strife gathering on the startled ear | |
| The sounds of their eternal conflict tell, | |
| Loud as o’er distant storms the thunder’s sinking knell. | |
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| Lo! hurrying on enwreathed in mist and foam, | 10 |
| His robes caught upward in delirious flight, | |
| Velino rushes from his mountain home, | |
| In beauty and in terror, from yon height | |
| One desperate bound hath hurled him, flashing might | |
| And wrath and madness from his skyey throne | 15 |
| Shot like a flying minister of light; | |
| High o’er the whirlpool wreck his crown is shown | |
| Forever hovering there in glittering state alone; | |
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| A glory haloing his ruin; there | |
| Tortured and writhing in the abyss he lies, | 20 |
| Yet on his shivered forehead he doth bear | |
| The flickering hues and light of his lost skies; | |
| Behold in eddying wreaths how o’er him rise | |
| The smoke, the reek, the steam of his wild breath, | |
| And the gleam flashed forth from his arrowy eyes, | 25 |
| How lend they darkening ’gainst the mountain heath, | |
| A horror to the scene, that war of life and death! | |
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