Page:Prometheus Bound, and other poems.djvu/174

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 * So finely that the pity scarcely pained!

I thought how Filicaja led on others,
 * Bewailers for their Italy enchained.

And how they called her childless among mother
 * Widow of empires, ay, and scarce refrained

Cursing her beauty to her face, as brothers
 * Might a shamed sister,—"Had she been less

She were less wretched,"—how, evoking so
 * From congregated wrong and heaped despair

Of men and women writhing under blow,
 * Harrowed and hideous in their filthy lair,

A personating Image, wherein woe
 * Was wrapt in beauty from offending much,

They called it Cybele, or Niobe,
 * Or laid it corpse-like on a bier for such,

Where the whole world might drop for Italy
 * Those cadenced tears which burn not where they touch,—

"Juliet of nations, canst thou die as we?
 * And was the violet crown that crowned thy head

So over large, though new buds made it rough,
 * It slipped down and across thine eyelids dead,

O sweet, fair Juliet?"—Of such songs enough;
 * Too many of such complaints! Behold, instead,

Void at Verona, Juliet's marble trough!
 * And void as that is, are all images

Men set between themselves and actual wrong,
 * To catch the weight of pity, meet the stress

Of conscience; though 'tis easier to gaze long
 * On personations, masks, and effigies,

Than to see live weak creatures crushed by strong.