The poet cannot turn to his theme, however, without a sad and scornful apostrophe to his own land, where he figures himself sitting by the way, and craving of the frivolous, heartless, luxurious Italian throngs that pass the charity of love for Italy. They pass him by unheeded, and he cries: Hast thou seen In the deep circle of the valley of Siddim, Under the shining skies of Palestine, The sinister glitter of the Lake of Asphalt? Those coasts, strewn thick with ashes of damnation, Forever foe to every living thing, Where rings the cry of the lost wandering bird That, on the shore of the perfidious sea, Athirsting dies,--that watery sepulcher Of the five cities of iniquity, Where even the tempest, when its clouds hang low, Passes in silence, and the lightning dies,-- If thou hast seen them, bitterly hath been Thy heart wrung with the misery and despair Of that dread vision! Yet there is on earth A woe more desperate and miserable,-- A spectacle wherein the wrath of God Avenges him more terribly. It is A vain, weak people of faint-heart old men, That, for three hundred years of dull repose, Has lain perpetual dreamer, folded in The ragged purple of its ancestors, Stretching its limbs wide in its country's sun, To warm them; drinking the soft airs of autumn Forgetful, on the fields where its forefathers Like lions fought! From overflowing hands, Strew we with hellebore and poppies thick The way. But the throngs have passed by, and the poet takes up his theme. Abel sits before an altar upon the borders of Eden, and looks with an exile's longing toward the Paradise of his father, where, high above all the other trees, he beholds, Lording it proudly in the garden's midst, The guilty apple with its fatal beauty. He weeps; and Cain, furiously returning from the unaccepted labor of the fields, lifts his hand against his brother. It was at sunset; The air was severed with a mother's shriek, And stretched beside the o'erturned altar's foot Lay the first corse. Ah! that primal stain Of blood that made earth hideous, did forebode To all the nations of mankind to come The cruel household stripes, and the relentless Battles of civil wars, the poisoned cup, The gleam of axes lifted up to strike The prone necks on the block. The fratricide Beheld that blood amazed, and from on high He heard the awful voice of cursing leap, And in the middle of his forehead felt God's lightning strike.... ....And there from out the heart All stained with guiltiness emerged the coward Religion that is born of loveless fears.