For prompt and mutual aid, Espected and accorded in the stress And peril of the war that all must wage; One in whose sight To arm the hand of man against his brother, Spread snares and stumbling blocks For mutual injury, Not less infatuate seems than in a camp Beleaguered, pressed, at hottest of the fight, If the defenders, careless of the foe, On their own soldiers levied hateful war And sought with fire and sword Their friends to overthrow.* When thoughts like these, made clear, Shine forth apparent to the general mind, And that first dread of Nature which combined Mortals in social bonds shall have returned, In part, through wisdom learned; Then civil intercourse upright and fair, Justice and piety, will have some root Better than haughty myths tradition feigns, Whereon much public probity is based

as all may see
That which on error stands elsewhere attains.
Oft on this barren shore

Clad as in mourning by the lava's flow,
That still a wavelike motion seems to show,
I sit at night, and, o'er this wilderness,
Austere and cultureless,
See the clear stars in deeps
Of purest blue come forth,
Whereto the sea her mirror turns below;
And in this glittering sphere
And vast serene of heaven, and all aglow.
Then, on these lights I gaze which to my eyes

Ι
Are only specks, although in truth so great
That land and sea with such
Compared, seem but a speck;
To whom man and this globe,
Where man himself is nought,

With such security

Our universe appear,

6

Are both alike unknown:
And when I see
Those yet again endless and more remote
Clusters or knots of stars,*
Each like a filmy cloud
To us, for whom not man, nor earth alone,
But all summed up in one,
The greater stars, the nearer heavenly host,
And golden sun
Exist not, or but seem
As they to us a point of nebulous light-
O poor humanity,
What art thou in my sight!
When, further, I but think
On thy estate below,
Here imaged in the clod beneath my feet,
How, on the other hand,
Thou wouldst be lord and ultimate aim of all,
Fabling so often, as thy pleasure is,
That on this grain of sand
Which 'Earth' we call
The authors of the universe came down
For thy behoof, and talked familiarly
With thee in human guise-
How, too, this age which others would excel
In manners and a true regard of things,
Renewing idle tales, insults the wise:
What thought of thee, unhappy race of man,
What feeling, at the last, my heart assails ?

I know not whether pity or scorn prevails.
As when at autumn, on the happy dwelling

Of an ant-nation in the crumbling glebe
Hollowed with art and toil, competitive,
By this assiduous race,
And providently stored against the cold-
From some high tree a little apple falling,
By ripeness and no other cause brought down,
Breaks, shatters and deforms it at a blow;
So, deluging from the dark sky above,
All suddenly, ruin and night conjoined,
Stones, pumice, cinders, streams of liquid fire
Shot upward by the mountains thund'rous womb

Into heaven's vault on high-
Or, overflowing down her flanks, immense
A flood of molten metal, burning sand,
Over the tender grass
Descended furiously,
And those bright cities by the sea that stood
On the land's furthest verge, in little space
Crushed, covered and consumed.
Above them now the goat
Browses at will; there other cities stand
To which the buried are but as the soil,
And on the prostrate ruin at her foot
The giant mountain treads as if in pride.
Truly no better care,
Or tenderness has Nature for the seed
Of man than for the breed
Of ants, whom she esteems
Like him, no more nor less.t
And if such carnage be indeed more rare
For man than for the ant, that puny race

Than ours more fruitful seems.
Full eighteen hundred years i
Have passed since vanished thus,
By force of fire o'erthrown these populous seats ;
And still the villager who heedful rears
His vines, to which on these gaunt fields
The parched and lifeless soil with drudgery yields
Poor nourishment, raises an anxious eye
To that dark summit, in no way appeased,
Still terrible, still menacing to pour
Ruin and death on him, his little ones,
And their scant household store !
Often the jaded hind
All night lies sleepless, starting up at times
To pace the ground, or from his hovel's roof, ,

on the part of the volcano are here indicated. Burning material was thrown up into the sky and then descended in a fiery čal on the district . Lava also overflowed from the

brink of the crater

and poured down like a sea of fire to the coast.

* L. was well acquainted with Pope whose somewhat similar lines may Tecar to the reader:

• Iwo forms of activity

In the hot wind,
Watch the descending track
Of the dread current, seething, that o'erflows
From the exhaustless womb
Adown the ash strewn back,
And burns, and glows,
Shining afar o'er Caprian sea and land,
Naples, the port, and Mergellina's strand.
Then if he see it near,
Or, from the bottom of the cottage well
Ever a sound can hear
Of water bubbling up,
In haste he wakes his children, wakes his wife,
With all that they can carry, swift! away! *
And fleeing, sees far off his little field
And dear familiar nest,
Their sole resource from want,
Become the prey
Of the devouring flood,
Inexorable, that hissing glides along

And spreads itself o'er all, enduringly.
Returns Pompeii, dead, to the heaven's light

Like a funereal torch
Through silent palaces that flickering goes
Wanders the ominous lava's mournful gleam
And, reddening in the darkness from afar
Tints dimly all around.
Thus ignorant of man and of the ages
That he calls ancient, ignorant of all
The sons who follow as their grandsires led,
Stands Nature ever young-
Or rather she proceeds, but by so long
A course she seems to stand.
Meanwhile the kingdoms fall,
Peoples decay, their languages are lost;
She sees it not; yet of Eternity
Man proudly makes his boast.
And thou that with thy fragrant woods adornest
These wasted lands, gentle Ginestra, thou
Must also yield to the relentless sway
Of the dread

power beneath
Who, to the accustomed place
Returning, soon will spread
Over each downy spray
Her ravenous mantle's verge.
Under that mortal burden thou wilt bow
Thine innocent and unresisting head;
Not meanly bent to supplicate in vain,
Ere it shall be the oppressor of that hour;
Not led by pride to seek
Vainly the stars, nor scornful of the waste
Where

, not thy will, but fortune placed
Being and birth for thee, that art indeed
Wiser than man, less weak
In this—thou deemest not thy feeble flower
Immortal made by Fate, or thine own power.