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(From Marino Faliero, Act III, Scene I)
I AM before the hour, the hour whose voice, | |
| Pealing into the arch of night, might strike | |
| These palaces with ominous tottering, | |
| And rock their marbles to the corner-stone, | |
| Waking the sleepers from some hideous dream | 5 |
| Of indistinct but awful augury | |
| Of that which will befall them. Yes, proud city! | |
| Thou must be cleansed of the black blood which makes thee | |
| A lazar-house of tyranny: the task | |
| Is forced upon me, I have sought it not; | 10 |
| And therefore was I punished, seeing this | |
| Patrician pestilence spread on and on, | |
| Until at length it smote me in my slumbers, | |
| And I am tainted, and must wash away | |
| The plague-spots in the healing wave. Tall fane! | 15 |
| Where sleep my fathers, whose dim statues shadow | |
| The floor which doth divide us from the dead, | |
| Where all the pregnant hearts of our bold blood, | |
| Mouldered into a mite of ashes, hold | |
| In one shrunk heap what once made many heroes, | 20 |
| When what is now a handful shook the earth,— | |
| Fane of the tutelar saints who guard our house! | |
| Vault where two doges rest,—my sires! who died | |
| The one of toil, the other in the field, | |
| With a long race of other lineal chiefs | 25 |
| And sages, whose great labors, wounds, and state | |
| I have inherited,—let the graves gape, | |
| Till all thine aisles be peopled with the dead, | |
| And pour them from thy portals to gaze on me! | |
| I call them up, and them and thee to witness | 30 |
| What it hath been which put me to this task,— | |
| Their pure high blood, their blazon-roll of glories, | |
| Their mighty name dishonored all in me, | |
| Not by me, but by the ungrateful nobles | |
| We fought to make our equals, not our lords. | 35 |
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