Ye crags and peaks: I'm with you once again! I hold to you the hands ye first beheld, To show they still are free. Methinks I hear A spirit in your echoes answer me, And bid your tenant welcome to his home Again!--O sacred forms, how proud you look! How high you lift your heads into the sky! How huge you are! how mighty, and how free! Ye are the things that tower, that shine,--whose smile Makes glad, whose frown is terrible, whose forms, Robed or unrobed, do all the impress wear Of awe divine. Ye guards of liberty, I'm with you once again!--I call to you With all my voice!--I hold my hands to you, To show they still are free. I rush to you As though I could embrace you! --Scaling yonder peak, I saw an eagle wheeling near its brow O'er the abyss;--his broad-expanded wings Lay calm and motionless upon the air, As if he floated there without their aid, By the sole act of his unlorded will, That buoyed him proudly up. Instinctively I bent my brow; yet kept he rounding still His airy circle, as in the delight Of measuring the ample range beneath And round about; absorbed, he heeded not The death that threatened him. I could not shoot!-- 'T was Liberty! I turned my bow aside, And let him soar away! J. S. Knowles. CXCV. THE BARON'S LAST BANQUET. O'er a low couch the setting sun had thrown its latest ray, Where, in his last, strong agony, a dying warrior lay,-- The stern old Baron Rudiger, whose frame had ne'er been bent By wasting pain, till time and toil its iron strength had spent. "They come around me here, and say my days of life are o'er, That I shall mount my noble steed and lead my band no more; They come, and, to my beard, they dare to tell me now that I, Their own liege lord and master born, that I--ha! ha! must die. "And what is death? I've dared him oft, before the Paynim spear; Think ye he's entered at my gate--has come to seek me here? I've met him, faced him, scorned him, when the fight was raging hot;-- I'll try his might, I'll brave his power!--defy--and fear him not!