Aught thine own? oh, rather say,
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul?
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander's wasting springs;195
As divinest Shakespeare's might
Fills Avon and the world with light
Like omniscient power, which he
Imaged 'mid mortality;
As the love from Petrarch's urn,200
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,
A quenchless lamp, by which the heart
Sees things unearthly;—so thou art,
Mighty spirit—so shall be
The city that did refuge thee.205
Lo, the sun floats up the sky
Like thought-wingèd Liberty,
Till the universal light
Seems to level plain and height;
From the sea a mist has spread,210
And the beams of morn lie dead
On the towers of Venice now,
Like its glory long ago.
By the skirts of that grey cloud
Many-domèd Padua proud215
Stands, a peopled solitude,
'Mid the harvest-shining plain,[1]
Where the peasant heaps his grain
In the garner of his foe,
And the milk-white oxen slow220
- ↑ There is no hyphen to connect harvest and shining in Shelley's edition; and it is possible that he inadvertently omitted it, as he often did; but I have supplied it because, as the line was originally printed, it might mean that Padua stood shining plainly amid the harvest, whereas I take it Shelley meant that she stood amid the plain which was shining with harvest.
