I hung my laurel’d head, Down on my lyre and said: “What answer does my sovereign, Freedom, make?” And in the air I heard Not even a whisper’d word From her for whom my very lungs do ache, And as an addled egg is, is my brain: Wherefore for her most royal and holy sake I think I will behowl her once again. “Hear me, O goddess! for it indeed is I That call thee, at thy knees, And don’t be frightened, please, At the many things I shall adjure thee by. Come to us, bright, in clear re-arisen ascendency, Loosen o’er us all thine orient oriflamme! By the power Mat Arnold calls: ‘A stream of tendency,’ By the Christianity we have proved a sham, By the lowering name that darkened Hebrew story We have turned to ‘Thou art not,’ that was once ‘I Am;’ We thy singers, we thy sons that work thee glory With the unburnt offerings of our worthless verses Heaped on thy shrine, adjure thee and adore thee: I, the clamouring herd’s choragus, I implore thee: By all the things that we bemire with curses―― That is, by all the holy things that are, Rise and make manifest upon us thy mercies, Rise o’er us all a large and lonely star. For the night is now far spent: the air gives warning With a dewy stir and chillness of the morning, And the wan dark whitens on the eastern hill. Burn through the east, grow large, and lighten, until In the saffron of the sunrise we discern thee Shining and trembling like a tear of gladness. Draw near to us, we will love thee, we will learn thee―― Learn thee to the heart, and love thee even to madness, If thou wilt only hear us in our crying Across the night, Conjuring thee by this our rhythmic sighing―― Our songs which might Have many senses but which have not one sense A man may see; By the sounding and the fluent form of nonsense We shower on thee; By the shallow and the babbling things, our mothers, From whom we spring; By the barking and the braying things, our brothers Like whom we sing; By all the fatuous things, our near relations, That chaunt and cheer us; By Leeds, and Liberal associations Oh, Freedom, hear us!” _St. James’s Gazette._ ――――:o:―――― PARODIES OF MR. SWINBURNE’S POLITICAL POEMS. Numerous parodies have been written of Mr. Swinburne’s political poems, and of these some have already appeared in this collection.