Sure there is need of social intercourse, Benevolence and peace and mutual aid, Between the nations, in a world that seems To toll the death-bell to its own decease; And by the voice of all its elements To preach the general doom. When were the winds Let slip with such a warrant to destroy? When did the waves so haughtily o’erleap Their ancient barriers, deluging the dry? Fires from beneath and meteors from above, Portentous, unexampled, unexplained, Have kindled beacons in the skies, and the old And crazy earth has had her shaking fits More frequent, and foregone her usual rest. Is it a time to wrangle, when the props And pillars of our planet seem to fail, And nature with a dim and sickly eye To wait the close of all? But grant her end More distant, and that prophecy demands A longer respite, unaccomplished yet; Still they are frowning signals, and bespeak Displeasure in His breast who smites the earth Or heals it, makes it languish or rejoice. And ’tis but seemly, that, where all deserve And stand exposed by common peccancy To what no few have felt, there should be peace, And brethren in calamity should love. Alas for Sicily, rude fragments now Lie scattered where the shapely column stood. Her palaces are dust. In all her streets The voice of singing and the sprightly chord Are silent. Revelry and dance and show Suffer a syncope and solemn pause, While God performs, upon the trembling stage Of His own works, His dreadful part alone. How does the earth receive Him?—With what signs Of gratulation and delight, her King? Pours she not all her choicest fruits abroad, Her sweetest flowers, her aromatic gums, Disclosing paradise where’er He treads? She quakes at His approach. Her hollow womb, Conceiving thunders, through a thousand deeps And fiery caverns roars beneath His foot. The hills move lightly and the mountains smoke, For He has touched them. From the extremest point Of elevation down into the abyss, His wrath is busy and His frown is felt. The rocks fall headlong and the valleys rise, The rivers die into offensive pools, And, charged with putrid verdure, breathe a gross And mortal nuisance into all the air. What solid was, by transformation strange Grows fluid, and the fixed and rooted earth Tormented into billows, heaves and swells, Or with vortiginous and hideous whirl Sucks down its prey insatiable. Immense The tumult and the overthrow, the pangs And agonies of human and of brute Multitudes, fugitive on every side, And fugitive in vain. The sylvan scene Migrates uplifted, and, with all its soil Alighting in far-distant fields, finds out A new possessor, and survives the change. Ocean has caught the frenzy, and upwrought To an enormous and o’erbearing height, Not by a mighty wind, but by that voice