Page:Posthumous poems (IA posthumousswinb00swin).pdf/23

 have been early in 1857. Sardinia was provoking Austria to a violent act, so as to make war inevitable: the house of Naples was filling the cup of its iniquities; "out of a court alive with creeping things" the stiletto of Agesilao Milano had flashed on the 8th of December, 1856, but had failed to slay the detestable Bomba, a disappointment obscurely referred to in the latter part of Strophe XIII. On the 16th of March, 1857, Vienna could bear no longer the violent attacks of the Italian Press on Austrian tyranny in Lombardy, and the Ambassador withdrew from Turin. Mazzini immediately left London, where he had resided since he fled from Rome, and descended once more upon Italy. He found that distraction was rife among the friends of the Republic, and that hope was dying out, "like a forgotten tale." It was at this moment, almost without question, that Swinburne composed his Ode to Mazzini, in the hour of suspense. The careful reader will not fail to observe that the poet has not yet heard of any acts which Mazzini has performed on the soil of Italy. Had the insurrections at Genoa (June 1857) and Leghorn occurred, or had the attack on Naples, led by Pisacane, Mazzini's friend, been made, the poet must have celebrated them in his verse.

Everything, then, tends to show that Swin-