ly die, deg.20
Die with the wide world spitting at Sparta, the stupid, the stander-by deg.? deg.21
Answer me quick,--what help, what hand do you stretch o'er destruction's brink?
How,--when? No care for my limbs!--there's lightning in all and some--
Fresh and fit your message to bear, once lips give it birth!"

O my Athens--Sparta love thee? did Sparta respond?
Every face of her leered in a furrow of envy, mistrust,
Malice,--each eye of her gave me its glitter of gratified hate!
Gravely they turned to take counsel, to cast for excuses. I stood
Quivering,--the limbs of me fretting as fire frets, an inch from dry wood:
"Persia has come, Athens asks aid, and still they debate? 30
Thunder, thou Zeus! Athene, are Spartans a quarry beyond
Swing of thy spear? Phoibos deg. and Artemis, deg. clang them 'Ye must'!" deg.32

No bolt launched from Olumpos deg.! Lo, their answer at last! deg.33
"Has Persia come,--does Athens ask aid,--may Sparta befriend?
Nowise precipitate judgment--too weighty the issue at stake!
Count we no time lost time which lags thro' respect to the Gods!
Ponder that precept of old, 'No warfare, whatever the odds
In your favour, so long as the moon, half-orbed, is unable to take
Full-circle her state in the sky!' Already she rounds to it fast:
Athens must wait, patient as we--who judgment suspend." 40

Athens,--except for that sparkle,--thy name, I had mouldered to ash!
That sent a blaze thro' my blood; off, off and away was I back,
--Not one word to waste, one look to lose on the false and the vile!
Yet "O Gods of my land!" I cried, as each hillock and plain,
Wood and stream, I knew, I named, rushing past them again,
"Have ye kept faith, proved mindful of honours we paid you erewhile?
Vain was the filleted victim, the fulsome libation! Too rash
Love in its choice, paid you so largely service so slack!

"Oak and olive and bay,--I bid you cease to en-wreathe
Brows made bold by your leaf! Fade at the Persian's foot, 50
You that, our patrons were pledged, should never adorn a slave!
Rather I hail thee, Parnes, deg.--trust to thy wild waste tract! deg.52
Treeless, herbless, lifeless mountain! What matter if slacked
My speed may hardly be, for homage to crag and to cave
No deity deigns to drape with verdure?--at least I can breathe,
Fear in thee no fraud from the blind, no lie from the m