No More Learning

Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep _1070
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.

A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies. _1075
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.

Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death's scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy _1080
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time _1085
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.

Saturn and Love their long repose _1090
Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued:
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers. _1095

Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past, _1100
Oh, might it die or rest at last!

NOTES:
_1068 his edition 1822; its editions 1839.
_1072 Argo]Argos edition 1822.
_1091-_1093 See Editor's note.
_1091 bright editions 1839; wise edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).
_1093 unsubdued editions 1839; unwithstood edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).


NOTES.

(1) THE QUENCHLESS ASHES OF MILAN [L. 60].

Milan was the centre of the resistance of the Lombard league against
the Austrian tyrant. Frederic Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground,
but liberty lived in its ashes, and it rose like an exhalation from
its ruin. See Sismondi's "Histoire des Republiques Italiennes", a book
which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of
their great ancestors.

(2) THE CHORUS [L. 197].

The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as
true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which
in all probability they will supersede, without considering their
merits in a relation more universal. The first stanza contrasts the
immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the
planets, and to use a common and inadequate phrase, "clothe themselves
in matter", with the transience of the noblest manifestations of the
external world.