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The First Black Flag.

("Avez-vous oui dire?")

[LES BURGRAVES, Part I., March, 1843.]

JOB. Hast thou ne'er heard men say

That, in the Black Wood, 'twixt Cologne and Spire,

Upon a rock flanked by the towering mountains,

A castle stands, renowned among all castles?

And in this fort, on piles of lava built,

A burgrave dwells, among all burgraves famed?

Hast heard of this wild man who laughs at laws -

Charged with a thousand crimes - for warlike deeds

Renowned - and placed under the Empire's ban

By the Diet of Frankfort; by the Council

Of Pisa banished from the Holy Church;

Reprobate, isolated, cursed - yet still

Unconquered 'mid his mountains and in will;

The bitter foe of the Count Palatine

And Treves' proud archbishop; who has spurned

For sixty years the ladder which the Empire

Upreared to scale his walls? Hast heard that he

Shelters the brave - the flaunting rich man strips -

Of master makes a slave? That here, above

All dukes, aye, kings, eke emperors - in the eyes

Of Germany to their fierce strife a prey,

He rears upon his tower, in stern defiance,

A signal of appeal to the crushed people,

A banner vast, of Sorrow's sable hue,

Snapped by the tempest in its whirlwind wrath,

So that kings quiver as the jades at whips?

Hast heard, he touches now his hundredth year -

And that, defying fate, in face of heaven,

On his invincible peak, no force of war

Uprooting other holds - nor powerful C'sar -

Nor Rome - nor age, that bows the pride of man -

Nor aught on earth - hath vanquished, or subdued,

Or bent this ancient Titan of the Rhine,

The excommunicated Job?

Democratic Review.