Their kindred cities to perpetual chains.
What could so base, so infamous a thought
In Spartan hearts inspire? Jealous, they sav
Respiring Athens,1 rear again her walls;
And the pale fury fired them, once again
To crush this rival city to the dust.
For now no more the noble social soul
Of Liberty my families combined;

But by short views, and selfish passions, broke,
Dire as when friends are rankled into foes,
They mixed severe, and waged eternal war;
Nor felt they, furious, their exhausted force ;
Nor, with false glory, discord, madness blind,
Saw how the blackening storm from Thracia came.
Long years rolled on,2 by many a battle stained,
The blush and boast of Fame! where courage, art,
And military glory shone supreme:

But let detesting ages, from the scene

Of Greece self-mangled, turn the sickening eye.
At last, when bleeding from a thousand wounds,
She felt her spirits fail; and in the dust

Her latest heroes, Nicias, Conon, lay,
Agesilaus, and the Theban friends;"

3

The Macedonian vulture marked his time,

4

By the dire scent of Cheronæa lured,

1 Athens had been dismantled by the Lacedemonians, at the end of the first Peloponnesian war, and was at this time restored by Conon to its former splendour.

2 The Peloponnesian war.

3 Pelopidas and Epaminondas.

The battle of Cheronæa, in which Philip of Macedon utterly defeated the Greeks.

And, fierce descending, seized his hapless prey.
"Thus tame submitted to the victor's yoke
Greece, once the gay, the turbulent, the bold;
For every grace, and muse, and science born;
With arts of War, of Government, elate;
To tyrants dreadful, dreadful to the best;
Whom I myself could scarcely rule: and thus
The Persian fetters, that inthralled the mind,
Were turned to formal and apparent chains.

"Unless Corruption first deject the pride,
And guardian vigour of the free-born soul,
All crude attempts of Violence are vain ;
For firm within, and while at heart untouched,
Ne'er yet by Force was Freedom overcome.
But soon as Independence stoops the head,
To Vice enslaved, and vice-created wants;
Then to some foul corrupting hand, whose waste
These heightened wants with fatal bounty feeds,
From man to man the slackening ruin runs,
Till the whole state unnerved in Slavery sinks."

CONTENTS.

As this part contains a description of the establish ment of Liberty in Rome, it begins with a view of the Grecian Colonies settled in the southern parts of Italy, which with Sicily constituted the Great Greece of the Ancients-With these colonies, the Spirit of Liberty, and of Republics, spreads over Italy-Transition to Pythagoras and his philosophy, which he taught through those free states and cities-Amidst the many small Republics in Italy, Rome the destined seat of Liberty-Her establishment there dated from the expulsion of the Tarquins-How differing from that in Greece-Reference to a view of the Roman Republic given in the First Part of this Poem to mark its Rise and Fall the peculiar purport of this-During its first ages, the greatest force of Liberty and Virtue exerted-The source whence derived the Heroic Virtues of the Romans-Enumeration of these Virtues-Thence their security at home; their glory, success, and empire abroad -Bounds of the Roman empire geographically describedThe states of Greece restored to Liberty by Titus Quintus Flaminius, the highest instance of public generosity and beneficence-The loss of Liberty in Rome-Its causes, progress, and completion in the death of Brutus-Rome under the emperors-From Rome the Goddess of Liberty goes among the Northern Nations; where, by infusing into them her Spirit and general principles, she lays the groundwork of her

Q

future establishments; sends them in vengeance on the Roman empire, now totally enslaved; and then, with Arts and Sciences in her train, quits earth during the dark ages-The celestial regions, to which Liberty retired, not proper to be opened to the view of mortals.

1

HERE melting mixed with air the ideal forms.
That painted still whate'er the goddess sung.
Then I, impatient." From extinguished Greece,
To what new region streamed the Human Day?”
She softly sighing, as when Zephyr leaves,
Resigned to Boreas, the declining year,
Resumed." Indignant, these last scenes I fled;1
And long ere then, Leucadia's cloudy cliff,
And the Ceraunian hills behind me thrown,
All Latium stood aroused. Ages before,
Great mother of republics! Greece had poured,
Swarm after swarm, her ardent youth around.
On Asia, Afric, Sicily, they stooped,
But chief on fair Hesperia's winding shore;
Where, from Lacinium 2 to Etrurian vales,
They rolled increasing colonies along,
And lent materials for my Roman reign.

With them my spirit spread; and numerous states,
And cities rose, on Grecian models formed;

As its parental policy and arts

Each had imbibed. Besides, to each assigned,

A guardian Genius o'er the public weal,
Kept an unclosing eye; tried to sustain,

1 The last struggles of Liberty in Greece.
2 A promontory in Calabria.

Or more sublime, the soul infused by me :
And strong the battle rose, with various wave,
Against the tyrant demons of the land.
Thus they their little wars and triumphs knew;
Their flows of fortune, and receding times,
But almost all below the proud regard
Of story vowed to Rome, on deeds intent
That Truth beyond the flight of Fable bore.
"Not so the Samian sage;1 to him belongs
The brightest witness of recording Fame.
For these free states his native isle 2 forsook,
And a vain tyrant's transitory smile,

He sought Crotona's pure salubrious air;

And through Great Greece3 his gentle wisdom taught;
Wisdom that calmed for listening years the mind,

4

Nor ever heard amid the storm of zeal.
His mental eye first launched into the deeps
Of boundless ether; where unnumbered orbs,
Myriads on myriads, through the pathless sky
Unerring roll, and wind their steady way.
There he the full consenting choir beheld;
There first discerned the secret band of love,
The kind attraction, that to central suns

Binds circling earths, and world with world unites.
Instructed thence, he great ideas formed

1 Pythagoras.

2 Samos, over which then reigned the tyrant Polycrates.

? The southern parts of Italy and Sicily, so called because of the Grecian colonies there settled.

♦ His scholars were enjoined silence for five years.