[Footnote 125: Galileo.]
[Footnote 126: A hill near Florence.]
ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.[127]
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant,[128] that from these may grow
A hundred-fold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.[129]
[Footnote 127: This sonnet refers to the persecution instituted in 1655
by the Duke of Savoy against the Vaudois Protestants.]
[Footnote 128: The Pope, who wore the triple crown or tiara.]
[Footnote 129: The Papacy, with which the Protestant reformers identified
Babylon the Great, the "Scarlet Woman" of Revelation.]
SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
THE VANITY OF MONUMENTS.
[From _Urn Burial_]
There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally
considereth all things.
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