A general growl: 'How? With his victors by? I and my Veronese? My troops and I? Receive us, was your word?' So jogged they on, Nor laughed their host too openly: once gone Into the trap!"-- Six hundred years ago! Such the time's aspect and peculiar woe (Yourselves may spell it yet in chronicles, Albeit the worm, our busy brother, drills His sprawling path through letters anciently Made fine and large to suit some abbot's eye) When the new Hohenstauffen dropped the mask, Flung John of Brienne's favor from his casque, Forswore crusading, had no mind to leave Saint Peter's proxy leisure to retrieve Losses to Otho and to Barbaross, Or make the Alps less easy to recross; And, thus confirming Pope Honorius' fear, Was excommunicate that very year. "The triple-bearded Teuton come to life!" Groaned the Great League; and, arming for the strife, [Sidenote: For the times grow stormy again.] Wide Lombardy, on tiptoe to begin, Took up, as it was Guelf or Ghibellin, Its cry; what cry? "The Emperor to come!" His crowd of feudatories, all and some, That leapt down with a crash of swords, spears, shields, One fighter on his fellow, to our fields, Scattered anon, took station here and there, And carried it, till now, with little care-- Cannot but cry for him; how else rebut Us longer? Cliffs, an earthquake suffered jut In the mid-sea, each domineering crest Which naught save such another throe can wrest From out (conceive) a certain chokeweed grown Since o'er the waters, twine and tangle thrown Too thick, too fast accumulating round, Too sure to over-riot and confound Ere long each brilliant islet with itself, Unless a second shock save shoal and shelf, Whirling the sea-drift wide: alas, the bruised And sullen wreck! Sunlight to be diffused For that! Sunlight, 'neath which, a scum at first, The million fibres of our chokeweed nurst Dispread themselves, mantling the troubled main, And, shattered by those rocks, took hold again, So kindly blazed it--that same blaze to brood O'er every cluster of the multitude Still hazarding new clasps, ties, filaments, An emulous exchange of pulses, vents Of nature into nature; till some growth Unfancied yet, exuberantly clothe [Sidenote: The Ghibellins' wish: the Guelfs' wish.] A surface solid now, continuous, one: "The Pope, for us the People, who begun The People, carries on the People thus, To keep that Kaiser off and dwell with us!" See you? Or say, Two Principles that live Each fitly by its Representative. "Hill-cat"--who called him so?--the gracefullest Adventurer, the ambiguous stranger-guest Of Lombardy (sleek but that ruffling fur, Those talons to their sheath!) whose velvet purr