Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.
The Falls of Terni
By John Edmund Reade (1800–1870)A
Volcanic throes within her breast we hear,
Or pent-up winds, or earth’s spasmodic start?
No, ’t is the cleaving Terni’s wild career;
On, where yon clouds like shrouded giants rear
Their shapes in azure distance, while the swell
Of the strife gathering on the startled ear
The sounds of their eternal conflict tell,
Loud as o’er distant storms the thunder’s sinking knell.
His robes caught upward in delirious flight,
Velino rushes from his mountain home,
In beauty and in terror, from yon height
One desperate bound hath hurled him, flashing might
And wrath and madness from his skyey throne
Shot like a flying minister of light;
High o’er the whirlpool wreck his crown is shown
Forever hovering there in glittering state alone;
Tortured and writhing in the abyss he lies,
Yet on his shivered forehead he doth bear
The flickering hues and light of his lost skies;
Behold in eddying wreaths how o’er him rise
The smoke, the reek, the steam of his wild breath,
And the gleam flashed forth from his arrowy eyes,
How lend they darkening ’gainst the mountain heath,
A horror to the scene, that war of life and death!