Earth.

A midnight black with clouds is in the sky;     I seem to feel, upon my limbs, the weight     Of its vast brooding shadow. All in vain     Turns the tired eye in search of form; no star     Pierces the pitchy veil; no ruddy blaze,     From dwellings lighted by the cheerful hearth,     Tinges the flowering summits of the grass.     No sound of life is heard, no village hum,     Nor measured tramp of footstep in the path,     Nor rush of wing, while, on the breast of Earth,     I lie and listen to her mighty voice:     A voice of many tones, sent up from streams     That wander through the gloom, from woods unseen,     Swayed by the sweeping of the tides of air,     From rocky chasms where darkness dwells all day,     And hollows of the great invisible hills,     And sands that edge the ocean, stretching far     Into the night, a melancholy sound!     O Earth! dost thou too sorrow for the past     Like man thy offspring? Do I hear thee mourn     Thy childhood's unreturning hours, thy springs     Gone with their genial airs and melodies,     The gentle generations of thy flowers,     And thy majestic groves of olden time,     Perished with all their dwellers? Dost thou wail     For that fair age of which the poets tell,     Ere the rude winds grew keen with frost, or fire     Fell with the rains, or spouted from the hills,     To blast thy greenness, while the virgin night     Was guiltless and salubrious as the day?     Or haply dost thou grieve for those that die,     For living things that trod thy paths awhile,     The love of thee and heaven, and now they sleep     Mixed with the shapeless dust on which thy herds     Trample and graze? I too must grieve with thee,     O'er loved ones lost. Their graves are far away     Upon thy mountains; yet, while I recline     Alone, in darkness, on thy naked soil,     The mighty nourisher and burial-place     Of man, I feel that I embrace their dust.     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.