Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

CANTO THE FOURTH.

I.

   I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;    A palace and a prison on each hand:    I saw from out the wave her structures rise    As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:    A thousand years their cloudy wings expand    Around me, and a dying glory smiles    O'er the far times when many a subject land    Looked to the winged Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!     

II.

   She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,    Rising with her tiara of proud towers    At airy distance, with majestic motion,    A ruler of the waters and their powers:    And such she was; her daughters had their dowers    From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East    Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.    In purple was she robed, and of her feast Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity increased.     

III.

   In Venice, Tasso's echoes are no more,    And silent rows the songless gondolier;    Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,    And music meets not always now the ear:    Those days are gone—but beauty still is here.    States fall, arts fade—but Nature doth not die,    Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,    The pleasant place of all festivity, The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!     

IV.

   But unto us she hath a spell beyond    Her name in story, and her long array    Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond    Above the dogeless city's vanished sway;    Ours is a trophy which will not decay    With the Rialto; Shylock and the Moor,    And Pierre, cannot be swept or worn away—    The keystones of the arch!    though all were o'er, For us repeopled were the solitary shore.     

V.

   The beings of the mind are not of clay;    Essentially immortal, they create    And multiply in us a brighter ray    And more beloved existence:  that which Fate    Prohibits to dull life, in this our state    Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied,    First exiles, then replaces what we hate;    Watering the heart whose early flowers have died, And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.     

VI.

   Such is the refuge of our youth and age,    The first from Hope, the last from Vacancy;    And this worn feeling peoples many a page,    And, may be, that which grows beneath mine eye:    Yet there are things whose strong reality    Outshines our fairy-land; in shape and hues    More beautiful than our fantastic sky,    And the strange constellations which the Muse O'er her wild universe is skilful to diffuse: 

VII.

   I saw or dreamed of such,—but let them go—    They came like truth, and disappeared like dreams;    And whatsoe'er they were—are now but so;    I could replace them if I would:  still teems    My mind with many a form which aptly seems    Such as I sought for, and at moments found;    Let these too go—for waking reason deems    Such overweening phantasies unsound, And other voices speak, and other sights surround.     

VIII.

   I've taught me other tongues, and in strange eyes    Have made me not a stranger; to the mind    Which is itself, no changes bring surprise;    Nor is it harsh to make, nor hard to find    A country with—ay, or without mankind;    Yet was I born where men are proud to be,    Not without cause; and should I leave behind    The inviolate island of the sage and free, And seek me out a home by a remoter sea, 

IX.

   Perhaps I loved it well:  and should I lay    My ashes in a soil which is not mine,    My spirit shall resume it—if we may    Unbodied choose a sanctuary.    I twine    My hopes of being remembered in my line    With my land's language:  if too fond and far    These aspirations in their scope incline,—    If my fame should be, as my fortunes are, Of hasty growth and blight, and dull Oblivion bar.     

X.

   My name from out the temple where the dead    Are honoured by the nations—let it be—    And light the laurels on a loftier head!    And be the Spartan's epitaph on me—    'Sparta hath many a worthier son than he.'    Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need;    The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree    I planted,—they have torn me, and I bleed: I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.     

XI.

   The spouseless Adriatic mourns her lord;    And, annual marriage now no more renewed,    The Bucentaur lies rotting unrestored,    Neglected garment of her widowhood!    St.    Mark yet sees his lion where he stood    Stand, but in mockery of his withered power,    Over the proud place where an Emperor sued,    And monarchs gazed and envied in the hour When Venice was a queen with an unequalled dower.     

XII.

   The Suabian sued, and now the Austrian reigns—    An Emperor tramples where an Emperor knelt;    Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces, and chains    Clank over sceptred cities; nations melt    From power's high pinnacle, when they have felt    The sunshine for a while, and downward go    Like lauwine loosened from the mountain's belt:    Oh for one hour of blind old Dandolo!    The octogenarian chief, Byzantium's conquering foe.     

XIII.

   Before St.    Mark still glow his steeds of brass,    Their gilded collars glittering in the sun;    But is not Doria's menace come to pass?    Are they not BRIDLED?    —Venice, lost and won,    Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done,    Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence she rose!    Better be whelmed beneath the waves, and shun,    Even in Destruction's depth, her foreign foes, From whom submission wrings an infamous repose.     

XIV.

   In youth she was all glory,—a new Tyre,—    Her very byword sprung from victory,    The 'Planter of the Lion,' which through fire    And blood she bore o'er subject earth and sea;    Though making many slaves, herself still free    And Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite:    Witness Troy's rival, Candia!    Vouch it, ye    Immortal waves that saw Lepanto's fight!    For ye are names no time nor tyranny can blight.     

XV.

   Statues of glass—all shivered—the long file    Of her dead doges are declined to dust;    But where they dwelt, the vast and sumptuous pile    Bespeaks the pageant of their splendid trust;    Their sceptre broken, and their sword in rust,    Have yielded to the stranger:  empty halls,    Thin streets, and foreign aspects, such as must    Too oft remind her who and what enthrals, Have flung a desolate cloud o'er Venice' lovely walls.     

XVI.

   When Athens' armies fell at Syracuse,    And fettered thousands bore the yoke of war,    Redemption rose up in the Attic Muse,    Her voice their only ransom from afar:    See!    as they chant the tragic hymn, the car    Of the o'ermastered victor stops, the reins    Fall from his hands—his idle scimitar    Starts from its belt—he rends his captive's chains, And bids him thank the bard for freedom and his strains.     

XVII.

   Thus, Venice, if no stronger claim were thine,    Were all thy proud historic deeds forgot,    Thy choral memory of the bard divine,    Thy love of Tasso, should have cut the knot    Which ties thee to thy tyrants; and thy lot    Is shameful to the nations,—most of all,    Albion!    to thee:  the Ocean Queen should not    Abandon Ocean's children; in the fall Of Venice think of thine, despite thy watery wall.     

XVIII.

   I loved her from my boyhood:  she to me    Was as a fairy city of the heart,    Rising like water-columns from the sea,    Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart    And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakspeare's art,    Had stamped her image in me, and e'en so,    Although I found her thus, we did not part,    Perchance e'en dearer in her day of woe, Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.     

XIX.

   I can repeople with the past—and of    The present there is still for eye and thought,    And meditation chastened down, enough;    And more, it may be, than I hoped or sought;    And of the happiest moments which were wrought    Within the web of my existence, some    From thee, fair Venice!    have their colours caught:    There are some feelings Time cannot benumb, Nor torture shake, or mine would now be cold and dumb.     

XX.

   But from their nature will the tannen grow    Loftiest on loftiest and least sheltered rocks,    Rooted in barrenness, where nought below    Of soil supports them 'gainst the Alpine shocks    Of eddying storms; yet springs the trunk, and mocks    The howling tempest, till its height and frame    Are worthy of the mountains from whose blocks    Of bleak, grey granite, into life it came, And grew a giant tree;—the mind may grow the same.     

XXI.

   Existence may be borne, and the deep root    Of life and sufferance make its firm abode    In bare and desolate bosoms:  mute    The camel labours with the heaviest load,    And the wolf dies in silence.    Not bestowed    In vain should such examples be; if they,    Things of ignoble or of savage mood,    Endure and shrink not, we of nobler clay May temper it to bear,—it is but for a day.     

XXII.

   All suffering doth destroy, or is destroyed,    Even by the sufferer; and, in each event,    Ends:—Some, with hope replenished and rebuoyed,    Return to whence they came—with like intent,    And weave their web again; some, bowed and bent,    Wax grey and ghastly, withering ere their time,    And perish with the reed on which they leant;    Some seek devotion, toil, war, good or crime, According as their souls were formed to sink or climb.     

XXIII.

   But ever and anon of griefs subdued    There comes a token like a scorpion's sting,    Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued;    And slight withal may be the things which bring    Back on the heart the weight which it would fling    Aside for ever:  it may be a sound—    A tone of music—summer's eve—or spring—    A flower—the wind—the ocean—which shall wound, Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.     

XXIV.

   And how and why we know not, nor can trace    Home to its cloud this lightning of the mind,    But feel the shock renewed, nor can efface    The blight and blackening which it leaves behind,    Which out of things familiar, undesigned,    When least we deem of such, calls up to view    The spectres whom no exorcism can bind,—    The cold—the changed—perchance the dead—anew, The mourned, the loved, the lost—too many!    —yet how few!     

XXV.

   But my soul wanders; I demand it back    To meditate amongst decay, and stand    A ruin amidst ruins; there to track    Fall'n states and buried greatness, o'er a land    Which WAS the mightiest in its old command,    And IS the loveliest, and must ever be    The master-mould of Nature's heavenly hand,    Wherein were cast the heroic and the free, The beautiful, the brave—the lords of earth and sea.     

XXVI.

   The commonwealth of kings, the men of Rome!    And even since, and now, fair Italy!    Thou art the garden of the world, the home    Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree;    Even in thy desert, what is like to thee?    Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste    More rich than other climes' fertility;    Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced.     

XXVII.

   The moon is up, and yet it is not night—    Sunset divides the sky with her—a sea    Of glory streams along the Alpine height    Of blue Friuli's mountains; Heaven is free    From clouds, but of all colours seems to be—    Melted to one vast Iris of the West,    Where the day joins the past eternity;    While, on the other hand, meek Dian's crest Floats through the azure air—an island of the blest!     

XXVIII.

   A single star is at her side, and reigns    With her o'er half the lovely heaven; but still    Yon sunny sea heaves brightly, and remains    Rolled o'er the peak of the far Rhaetian hill,    As Day and Night contending were, until    Nature reclaimed her order:—gently flows    The deep-dyed Brenta, where their hues instil    The odorous purple of a new-born rose, Which streams upon her stream, and glassed within it glows, 

XXIX.

   Filled with the face of heaven, which, from afar,    Comes down upon the waters; all its hues,    From the rich sunset to the rising star,    Their magical variety diffuse:    And now they change; a paler shadow strews    Its mantle o'er the mountains; parting day    Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues    With a new colour as it gasps away, The last still loveliest, till—'tis gone—and all is grey.     

XXX.

   There is a tomb in Arqua;—reared in air,    Pillared in their sarcophagus, repose    The bones of Laura's lover:  here repair    Many familiar with his well-sung woes,    The pilgrims of his genius.    He arose    To raise a language, and his land reclaim    From the dull yoke of her barbaric foes:    Watering the tree which bears his lady's name With his melodious tears, he gave himself to fame.     

XXXI.

   They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died;    The mountain-village where his latter days    Went down the vale of years; and 'tis their pride—    An honest pride—and let it be their praise,    To offer to the passing stranger's gaze    His mansion and his sepulchre; both plain    And venerably simple, such as raise    A feeling more accordant with his strain, Than if a pyramid formed his monumental fane.     

XXXII.

   And the soft quiet hamlet where he dwelt    Is one of that complexion which seems made    For those who their mortality have felt,    And sought a refuge from their hopes decayed    In the deep umbrage of a green hill's shade,    Which shows a distant prospect far away    Of busy cities, now in vain displayed,    For they can lure no further; and the ray Of a bright sun can make sufficient holiday.     

XXXIII.

   Developing the mountains, leaves, and flowers    And shining in the brawling brook, where-by,    Clear as its current, glide the sauntering hours    With a calm languor, which, though to the eye    Idlesse it seem, hath its morality,    If from society we learn to live,    'Tis solitude should teach us how to die;    It hath no flatterers; vanity can give No hollow aid; alone—man with his God must strive: 

XXXIV.

   Or, it may be, with demons, who impair    The strength of better thoughts, and seek their prey    In melancholy bosoms, such as were    Of moody texture from their earliest day,    And loved to dwell in darkness and dismay,    Deeming themselves predestined to a doom    Which is not of the pangs that pass away;    Making the sun like blood, the earth a tomb, The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom.     

XXXV.

   Ferrara!    in thy wide and grass-grown streets,    Whose symmetry was not for solitude,    There seems as 'twere a curse upon the seat's    Of former sovereigns, and the antique brood    Of Este, which for many an age made good    Its strength within thy walls, and was of yore    Patron or tyrant, as the changing mood    Of petty power impelled, of those who wore The wreath which Dante's brow alone had worn before.     

XXXVI.

   And Tasso is their glory and their shame.    Hark to his strain!    and then survey his cell!    And see how dearly earned Torquato's fame,    And where Alfonso bade his poet dwell.    The miserable despot could not quell    The insulted mind he sought to quench, and blend    With the surrounding maniacs, in the hell    Where he had plunged it.    Glory without end Scattered the clouds away—and on that name attend 

XXXVII.

   The tears and praises of all time, while thine    Would rot in its oblivion—in the sink    Of worthless dust, which from thy boasted line    Is shaken into nothing; but the link    Thou formest in his fortunes bids us think    Of thy poor malice, naming thee with scorn—    Alfonso!    how thy ducal pageants shrink    From thee!    if in another station born, Scarce fit to be the slave of him thou mad'st to mourn: 

XXXVIII.

   THOU!    formed to eat, and be despised, and die,    Even as the beasts that perish, save that thou    Hadst a more splendid trough, and wider sty:    HE!    with a glory round his furrowed brow,    Which emanated then, and dazzles now    In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire,    And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow    No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, That whetstone of the teeth—monotony in wire!     

XXXIX.

   Peace to Torquato's injured shade!    'twas his    In life and death to be the mark where Wrong    Aimed with their poisoned arrows—but to miss.    Oh, victor unsurpassed in modern song!    Each year brings forth its millions; but how long    The tide of generations shall roll on,    And not the whole combined and countless throng    Compose a mind like thine?    Though all in one Condensed their scattered rays, they would not form a sun.     

XL.

   Great as thou art, yet paralleled by those    Thy countrymen, before thee born to shine,    The bards of Hell and Chivalry:  first rose    The Tuscan father's comedy divine;    Then, not unequal to the Florentine,    The Southern Scott, the minstrel who called forth    A new creation with his magic line,    And, like the Ariosto of the North, Sang ladye-love and war, romance and knightly worth.     

XLI.

   The lightning rent from Ariosto's bust    The iron crown of laurel's mimicked leaves;    Nor was the ominous element unjust,    For the true laurel-wreath which Glory weaves    Is of the tree no bolt of thunder cleaves,    And the false semblance but disgraced his brow;    Yet still, if fondly Superstition grieves,    Know that the lightning sanctifies below Whate'er it strikes;—yon head is doubly sacred now.     

XLII.

   Italia!    O Italia!    thou who hast    The fatal gift of beauty, which became    A funeral dower of present woes and past,    On thy sweet brow is sorrow ploughed by shame,    And annals graved in characters of flame.    Oh God!    that thou wert in thy nakedness    Less lovely or more powerful, and couldst claim    Thy right, and awe the robbers back, who press To shed thy blood, and drink the tears of thy distress; 

XLIII.

   Then mightst thou more appal; or, less desired,    Be homely and be peaceful, undeplored    For thy destructive charms; then, still untired,    Would not be seen the armed torrents poured    Down the deep Alps; nor would the hostile horde    Of many-nationed spoilers from the Po    Quaff blood and water; nor the stranger's sword    Be thy sad weapon of defence, and so, Victor or vanquished, thou the slave of friend or foe.     

XLIV.

   Wandering in youth, I traced the path of him,    The Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind,    The friend of Tully:  as my bark did skim    The bright blue waters with a fanning wind,    Came Megara before me, and behind    AEgina lay, Piraeus on the right,    And Corinth on the left; I lay reclined    Along the prow, and saw all these unite In ruin, even as he had seen the desolate sight; 

XLV.

   For time hath not rebuilt them, but upreared    Barbaric dwellings on their shattered site,    Which only make more mourned and more endeared    The few last rays of their far-scattered light,    And the crushed relics of their vanished might.    The Roman saw these tombs in his own age,    These sepulchres of cities, which excite    Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage.     

XLVI.

   That page is now before me, and on mine    HIS country's ruin added to the mass    Of perished states he mourned in their decline,    And I in desolation:  all that WAS    Of then destruction IS; and now, alas!    Rome—Rome imperial, bows her to the storm,    In the same dust and blackness, and we pass    The skeleton of her Titanic form, Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm.     

XLVII.

   Yet, Italy!    through every other land    Thy wrongs should ring, and shall, from side to side;    Mother of Arts!    as once of Arms; thy hand    Was then our Guardian, and is still our guide;    Parent of our religion!    whom the wide    Nations have knelt to for the keys of heaven!    Europe, repentant of her parricide,    Shall yet redeem thee, and, all backward driven, Roll the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven.     

XLVIII.

   But Arno wins us to the fair white walls,    Where the Etrurian Athens claims and keeps    A softer feeling for her fairy halls.    Girt by her theatre of hills, she reaps    Her corn, and wine, and oil, and Plenty leaps    To laughing life, with her redundant horn.    Along the banks where smiling Arno sweeps,    Was modern Luxury of Commerce born, And buried Learning rose, redeemed to a new morn.     

XLIX.

   There, too, the goddess loves in stone, and fills    The air around with beauty; we inhale    The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils    Part of its immortality; the veil    Of heaven is half undrawn; within the pale    We stand, and in that form and face behold    What Mind can make, when Nature's self would fail;    And to the fond idolaters of old Envy the innate flash which such a soul could mould: 

L.

   We gaze and turn away, and know not where,    Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart    Reels with its fulness; there—for ever there—    Chained to the chariot of triumphal Art,    We stand as captives, and would not depart.    Away!    —there need no words, nor terms precise,    The paltry jargon of the marble mart,    Where Pedantry gulls Folly—we have eyes: Blood, pulse, and breast, confirm the Dardan Shepherd's prize.     

LI.

   Appearedst thou not to Paris in this guise?    Or to more deeply blest Anchises?    or,    In all thy perfect goddess-ship, when lies    Before thee thy own vanquished Lord of War?    And gazing in thy face as toward a star,    Laid on thy lap, his eyes to thee upturn,    Feeding on thy sweet cheek!    while thy lips are    With lava kisses melting while they burn, Showered on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from an urn!     

LII.

   Glowing, and circumfused in speechless love,    Their full divinity inadequate    That feeling to express, or to improve,    The gods become as mortals, and man's fate    Has moments like their brightest!    but the weight    Of earth recoils upon us;—let it go!    We can recall such visions, and create    From what has been, or might be, things which grow, Into thy statue's form, and look like gods below.     

LIII.

   I leave to learned fingers, and wise hands,    The artist and his ape, to teach and tell    How well his connoisseurship understands    The graceful bend, and the voluptuous swell:    Let these describe the undescribable:    I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream    Wherein that image shall for ever dwell;    The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam.     

LIV.

   In Santa Croce's holy precincts lie    Ashes which make it holier, dust which is    E'en in itself an immortality,    Though there were nothing save the past, and this    The particle of those sublimities    Which have relapsed to chaos:—here repose    Angelo's, Alfieri's bones, and his,    The starry Galileo, with his woes; Here Machiavelli's earth returned to whence it rose.     

LV.

   These are four minds, which, like the elements,    Might furnish forth creation:—Italy!    Time, which hath wronged thee with ten thousand rents    Of thine imperial garment, shall deny,    And hath denied, to every other sky,    Spirits which soar from ruin:—thy decay    Is still impregnate with divinity,    Which gilds it with revivifying ray; Such as the great of yore, Canova is to-day.     

LVI.

   But where repose the all Etruscan three—    Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they,    The Bard of Prose, creative spirit!    he    Of the Hundred Tales of love—where did they lay    Their bones, distinguished from our common clay    In death as life?    Are they resolved to dust,    And have their country's marbles nought to say?    Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust?    Did they not to her breast their filial earth entrust?     

LVII.

   Ungrateful Florence!    Dante sleeps afar,    Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore;    Thy factions, in their worse than civil war,    Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore    Their children's children would in vain adore    With the remorse of ages; and the crown    Which Petrarch's laureate brow supremely wore,    Upon a far and foreign soil had grown, His life, his fame, his grave, though rifled—not thine own.     

LVIII.

   Boccaccio to his parent earth bequeathed    His dust,—and lies it not her great among,    With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed    O'er him who formed the Tuscan's siren tongue?    That music in itself, whose sounds are song,    The poetry of speech?    No;—even his tomb    Uptorn, must bear the hyaena bigots' wrong,    No more amidst the meaner dead find room, Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for WHOM?     

LIX.

   And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust;    Yet for this want more noted, as of yore    The Caesar's pageant, shorn of Brutus' bust,    Did but of Rome's best son remind her more:    Happier Ravenna!    on thy hoary shore,    Fortress of falling empire!    honoured sleeps    The immortal exile;—Arqua, too, her store    Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps, While Florence vainly begs her banished dead, and weeps.     

LX.

   What is her pyramid of precious stones?    Of porphyry, jasper, agate, and all hues    Of gem and marble, to encrust the bones    Of merchant-dukes?    the momentary dews    Which, sparkling to the twilight stars, infuse    Freshness in the green turf that wraps the dead,    Whose names are mausoleums of the Muse,    Are gently prest with far more reverent tread Than ever paced the slab which paves the princely head.     

LXI.

   There be more things to greet the heart and eyes    In Arno's dome of Art's most princely shrine,    Where Sculpture with her rainbow sister vies;    There be more marvels yet—but not for mine;    For I have been accustomed to entwine    My thoughts with Nature rather in the fields    Than Art in galleries:  though a work divine    Calls for my spirit's homage, yet it yields Less than it feels, because the weapon which it wields 

LXII.

   Is of another temper, and I roam    By Thrasimene's lake, in the defiles    Fatal to Roman rashness, more at home;    For there the Carthaginian's warlike wiles    Come back before me, as his skill beguiles    The host between the mountains and the shore,    Where Courage falls in her despairing files,    And torrents, swoll'n to rivers with their gore, Reek through the sultry plain, with legions scattered o'er, 

LXIII.

   Like to a forest felled by mountain winds;    And such the storm of battle on this day,    And such the frenzy, whose convulsion blinds    To all save carnage, that, beneath the fray,    An earthquake reeled unheededly away!    None felt stern Nature rocking at his feet,    And yawning forth a grave for those who lay    Upon their bucklers for a winding-sheet; Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet.     

LXIV.

   The Earth to them was as a rolling bark    Which bore them to Eternity; they saw    The Ocean round, but had no time to mark    The motions of their vessel:  Nature's law,    In them suspended, recked not of the awe    Which reigns when mountains tremble, and the birds    Plunge in the clouds for refuge, and withdraw    From their down-toppling nests; and bellowing herds Stumble o'er heaving plains, and man's dread hath no words.     

LXV.

   Far other scene is Thrasimene now;    Her lake a sheet of silver, and her plain    Rent by no ravage save the gentle plough;    Her aged trees rise thick as once the slain    Lay where their roots are; but a brook hath ta'en—    A little rill of scanty stream and bed—    A name of blood from that day's sanguine rain;    And Sanguinetto tells ye where the dead Made the earth wet, and turned the unwilling waters red.     

LXVI.

   But thou, Clitumnus!    in thy sweetest wave    Of the most living crystal that was e'er    The haunt of river nymph, to gaze and lave    Her limbs where nothing hid them, thou dost rear    Thy grassy banks whereon the milk-white steer    Grazes; the purest god of gentle waters!    And most serene of aspect, and most clear:    Surely that stream was unprofaned by slaughters, A mirror and a bath for Beauty's youngest daughters!     

LXVII.

   And on thy happy shore a temple still,    Of small and delicate proportion, keeps,    Upon a mild declivity of hill,    Its memory of thee; beneath it sweeps    Thy current's calmness; oft from out it leaps    The finny darter with the glittering scales,    Who dwells and revels in thy glassy deeps;    While, chance, some scattered water-lily sails Down where the shallower wave still tells its bubbling tales.     

LXVIII.

   Pass not unblest the genius of the place!    If through the air a zephyr more serene    Win to the brow, 'tis his; and if ye trace    Along his margin a more eloquent green,    If on the heart the freshness of the scene    Sprinkle its coolness, and from the dry dust    Of weary life a moment lave it clean    With Nature's baptism,—'tis to him ye must Pay orisons for this suspension of disgust.     

LXIX.

   The roar of waters!    —from the headlong height    Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;    The fall of waters!    rapid as the light    The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss;    The hell of waters!    where they howl and hiss,    And boil in endless torture; while the sweat    Of their great agony, wrung out from this    Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set, 

LXX.

   And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again    Returns in an unceasing shower, which round,    With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain,    Is an eternal April to the ground,    Making it all one emerald.    How profound    The gulf!    and how the giant element    From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,    Crushing the cliffs, which, downward worn and rent With his fierce footsteps, yield in chasms a fearful vent 

LXXI.

   To the broad column which rolls on, and shows    More like the fountain of an infant sea    Torn from the womb of mountains by the throes    Of a new world, than only thus to be    Parent of rivers, which flow gushingly,    With many windings through the vale:—Look back!    Lo!    where it comes like an eternity,    As if to sweep down all things in its track, Charming the eye with dread,—a matchless cataract, 

LXXII.

   Horribly beautiful!    but on the verge,    From side to side, beneath the glittering morn,    An Iris sits, amidst the infernal surge,    Like Hope upon a deathbed, and, unworn    Its steady dyes, while all around is torn    By the distracted waters, bears serene    Its brilliant hues with all their beams unshorn:    Resembling, mid the torture of the scene, Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.     

LXXIII.

   Once more upon the woody Apennine,    The infant Alps, which—had I not before    Gazed on their mightier parents, where the pine    Sits on more shaggy summits, and where roar    The thundering lauwine—might be worshipped more;    But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau rear    Her never-trodden snow, and seen the hoar    Glaciers of bleak Mont Blanc both far and near, And in Chimari heard the thunder-hills of fear, 

LXXIV.

   The Acroceraunian mountains of old name;    And on Parnassus seen the eagles fly    Like spirits of the spot, as 'twere for fame,    For still they soared unutterably high:    I've looked on Ida with a Trojan's eye;    Athos, Olympus, AEtna, Atlas, made    These hills seem things of lesser dignity,    All, save the lone Soracte's height displayed, Not NOW in snow, which asks the lyric Roman's aid 

LXXV.

   For our remembrance, and from out the plain    Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break,    And on the curl hangs pausing:  not in vain    May he who will his recollections rake,    And quote in classic raptures, and awake    The hills with Latian echoes; I abhorred    Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake,    The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record 

LXXVI.

   Aught that recalls the daily drug which turned    My sickening memory; and, though Time hath taught    My mind to meditate what then it learned,    Yet such the fixed inveteracy wrought    By the impatience of my early thought,    That, with the freshness wearing out before    My mind could relish what it might have sought,    If free to choose, I cannot now restore Its health; but what it then detested, still abhor.     

LXXVII.

   Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so,    Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse    To understand, not feel, thy lyric flow,    To comprehend, but never love thy verse,    Although no deeper moralist rehearse    Our little life, nor bard prescribe his art,    Nor livelier satirist the conscience pierce,    Awakening without wounding the touched heart, Yet fare thee well—upon Soracte's ridge we part.     

LXXVIII.

   O Rome!    my country!    city of the soul!    The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,    Lone mother of dead empires!    and control    In their shut breasts their petty misery.    What are our woes and sufferance?    Come and see    The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way    O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye!    Whose agonies are evils of a day— A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.     

LXXIX.

   The Niobe of nations!    there she stands,    Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;    An empty urn within her withered hands,    Whose holy dust was scattered long ago;    The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;    The very sepulchres lie tenantless    Of their heroic dwellers:  dost thou flow,    Old Tiber!    through a marble wilderness?    Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress!     

LXXX.

   The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood, and Fire,    Have dwelt upon the seven-hilled city's pride:    She saw her glories star by star expire,    And up the steep barbarian monarchs ride,    Where the car climbed the Capitol; far and wide    Temple and tower went down, nor left a site;—    Chaos of ruins!    who shall trace the void,    O'er the dim fragments cast a lunar light, And say, 'Here was, or is,' where all is doubly night?     

LXXXI.

   The double night of ages, and of her,    Night's daughter, Ignorance, hath wrapt, and wrap    All round us; we but feel our way to err:    The ocean hath its chart, the stars their map;    And knowledge spreads them on her ample lap;    But Rome is as the desert, where we steer    Stumbling o'er recollections:  now we clap    Our hands, and cry, 'Eureka!'    it is clear— When but some false mirage of ruin rises near.     

LXXXII.

   Alas, the lofty city!    and alas    The trebly hundred triumphs!    and the day    When Brutus made the dagger's edge surpass    The conqueror's sword in bearing fame away!    Alas for Tully's voice, and Virgil's lay,    And Livy's pictured page!    But these shall be    Her resurrection; all beside—decay.    Alas for Earth, for never shall we see That brightness in her eye she bore when Rome was free!     

LXXXIII.

   O thou, whose chariot rolled on Fortune's wheel,    Triumphant Sylla!    Thou, who didst subdue    Thy country's foes ere thou wouldst pause to feel    The wrath of thy own wrongs, or reap the due    Of hoarded vengeance till thine eagles flew    O'er prostrate Asia;—thou, who with thy frown    Annihilated senates—Roman, too,    With all thy vices, for thou didst lay down With an atoning smile a more than earthly crown— 

LXXXIV.

   The dictatorial wreath,—couldst thou divine    To what would one day dwindle that which made    Thee more than mortal?    and that so supine    By aught than Romans Rome should thus be laid?    She who was named eternal, and arrayed    Her warriors but to conquer—she who veiled    Earth with her haughty shadow, and displayed    Until the o'er-canopied horizon failed, Her rushing wings—Oh!    she who was almighty hailed!     

LXXXV.

   Sylla was first of victors; but our own,    The sagest of usurpers, Cromwell!    —he    Too swept off senates while he hewed the throne    Down to a block—immortal rebel!    See    What crimes it costs to be a moment free    And famous through all ages!    But beneath    His fate the moral lurks of destiny;    His day of double victory and death Beheld him win two realms, and, happier, yield his breath.     

LXXXVI.

   The third of the same moon whose former course    Had all but crowned him, on the self-same day    Deposed him gently from his throne of force,    And laid him with the earth's preceding clay.    And showed not Fortune thus how fame and sway,    And all we deem delightful, and consume    Our souls to compass through each arduous way,    Are in her eyes less happy than the tomb?    Were they but so in man's, how different were his doom!     

LXXXVII.

   And thou, dread statue!    yet existent in    The austerest form of naked majesty,    Thou who beheldest, mid the assassins' din,    At thy bathed base the bloody Caesar lie,    Folding his robe in dying dignity,    An offering to thine altar from the queen    Of gods and men, great Nemesis!    did he die,    And thou, too, perish, Pompey?    have ye been Victors of countless kings, or puppets of a scene?     

LXXXVIII.

   And thou, the thunder-stricken nurse of Rome!    She-wolf!    whose brazen-imaged dugs impart    The milk of conquest yet within the dome    Where, as a monument of antique art,    Thou standest:—Mother of the mighty heart,    Which the great founder sucked from thy wild teat,    Scorched by the Roman Jove's ethereal dart,    And thy limbs blacked with lightning—dost thou yet Guard thine immortal cubs, nor thy fond charge forget?     

LXXXIX.

   Thou dost;—but all thy foster-babes are dead—    The men of iron; and the world hath reared    Cities from out their sepulchres:  men bled    In imitation of the things they feared,    And fought and conquered, and the same course steered,    At apish distance; but as yet none have,    Nor could, the same supremacy have neared,    Save one vain man, who is not in the grave, But, vanquished by himself, to his own slaves a slave, 

XC.

   The fool of false dominion—and a kind    Of bastard Caesar, following him of old    With steps unequal; for the Roman's mind    Was modelled in a less terrestrial mould,    With passions fiercer, yet a judgment cold,    And an immortal instinct which redeemed    The frailties of a heart so soft, yet bold.    Alcides with the distaff now he seemed At Cleopatra's feet, and now himself he beamed.     

XCI.

   And came, and saw, and conquered.    But the man    Who would have tamed his eagles down to flee,    Like a trained falcon, in the Gallic van,    Which he, in sooth, long led to victory,    With a deaf heart which never seemed to be    A listener to itself, was strangely framed;    With but one weakest weakness—vanity:    Coquettish in ambition, still he aimed At what?    Can he avouch, or answer what he claimed?     

XCII.

   And would be all or nothing—nor could wait    For the sure grave to level him; few years    Had fixed him with the Caesars in his fate,    On whom we tread:  For THIS the conqueror rears    The arch of triumph!    and for this the tears    And blood of earth flow on as they have flowed,    An universal deluge, which appears    Without an ark for wretched man's abode, And ebbs but to reflow!    —Renew thy rainbow, God!     

XCIII.

   What from this barren being do we reap?    Our senses narrow, and our reason frail,    Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep,    And all things weighed in custom's falsest scale;    Opinion an omnipotence, whose veil    Mantles the earth with darkness, until right    And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale    Lest their own judgments should become too bright, And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have too much light.     

XCIV.

   And thus they plod in sluggish misery,    Rotting from sire to son, and age to age,    Proud of their trampled nature, and so die,    Bequeathing their hereditary rage    To the new race of inborn slaves, who wage    War for their chains, and rather than be free,    Bleed gladiator-like, and still engage    Within the same arena where they see Their fellows fall before, like leaves of the same tree.     

XCV.

   I speak not of men's creeds—they rest between    Man and his Maker—but of things allowed,    Averred, and known,—and daily, hourly seen—    The yoke that is upon us doubly bowed,    And the intent of tyranny avowed,    The edict of Earth's rulers, who are grown    The apes of him who humbled once the proud,    And shook them from their slumbers on the throne; Too glorious, were this all his mighty arm had done.     

XCVI.

   Can tyrants but by tyrants conquered be,    And Freedom find no champion and no child    Such as Columbia saw arise when she    Sprung forth a Pallas, armed and undefiled?    Or must such minds be nourished in the wild,    Deep in the unpruned forest, midst the roar    Of cataracts, where nursing nature smiled    On infant Washington?    Has Earth no more Such seeds within her breast, or Europe no such shore?     

XCVII.

   But France got drunk with blood to vomit crime,    And fatal have her Saturnalia been    To Freedom's cause, in every age and clime;    Because the deadly days which we have seen,    And vile Ambition, that built up between    Man and his hopes an adamantine wall,    And the base pageant last upon the scene,    Are grown the pretext for the eternal thrall Which nips Life's tree, and dooms man's worst—his second fall.     

XCVIII.

   Yet, Freedom!    yet thy banner, torn, but flying,    Streams like the thunder-storm AGAINST the wind;    Thy trumpet-voice, though broken now and dying,    The loudest still the tempest leaves behind;    Thy tree hath lost its blossoms, and the rind,    Chopped by the axe, looks rough and little worth,    But the sap lasts,—and still the seed we find    Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North; So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth.     

XCIX.

   There is a stern round tower of other days,    Firm as a fortress, with its fence of stone,    Such as an army's baffled strength delays,    Standing with half its battlements alone,    And with two thousand years of ivy grown,    The garland of eternity, where wave    The green leaves over all by time o'erthrown:    What was this tower of strength?    within its cave What treasure lay so locked, so hid?    —A woman's grave.     

C.

   But who was she, the lady of the dead,    Tombed in a palace?    Was she chaste and fair?    Worthy a king's—or more—a Roman's bed?    What race of chiefs and heroes did she bear?    What daughter of her beauties was the heir?    How lived—how loved—how died she?    Was she not    So honoured—and conspicuously there,    Where meaner relics must not dare to rot, Placed to commemorate a more than mortal lot?     

CI.

   Was she as those who love their lords, or they    Who love the lords of others?    such have been    Even in the olden time, Rome's annals say.    Was she a matron of Cornelia's mien,    Or the light air of Egypt's graceful queen,    Profuse of joy; or 'gainst it did she war,    Inveterate in virtue?    Did she lean    To the soft side of the heart, or wisely bar Love from amongst her griefs?    —for such the affections are.     

CII.

   Perchance she died in youth:  it may be, bowed    With woes far heavier than the ponderous tomb    That weighed upon her gentle dust, a cloud    Might gather o'er her beauty, and a gloom    In her dark eye, prophetic of the doom    Heaven gives its favourites—early death; yet shed    A sunset charm around her, and illume    With hectic light, the Hesperus of the dead, Of her consuming cheek the autumnal leaf-like red.     

CIII.

   Perchance she died in age—surviving all,    Charms, kindred, children—with the silver grey    On her long tresses, which might yet recall,    It may be, still a something of the day    When they were braided, and her proud array    And lovely form were envied, praised, and eyed    By Rome—But whither would Conjecture stray?    Thus much alone we know—Metella died, The wealthiest Roman's wife:  Behold his love or pride!     

CIV.

   I know not why—but standing thus by thee    It seems as if I had thine inmate known,    Thou Tomb!    and other days come back on me    With recollected music, though the tone    Is changed and solemn, like the cloudy groan    Of dying thunder on the distant wind;    Yet could I seat me by this ivied stone    Till I had bodied forth the heated mind, Forms from the floating wreck which ruin leaves behind; 

CV.

   And from the planks, far shattered o'er the rocks,    Built me a little bark of hope, once more    To battle with the ocean and the shocks    Of the loud breakers, and the ceaseless roar    Which rushes on the solitary shore    Where all lies foundered that was ever dear:    But could I gather from the wave-worn store    Enough for my rude boat, where should I steer?    There woos no home, nor hope, nor life, save what is here.     

CVI.

   Then let the winds howl on!    their harmony    Shall henceforth be my music, and the night    The sound shall temper with the owlet's cry,    As I now hear them, in the fading light    Dim o'er the bird of darkness' native site,    Answer each other on the Palatine,    With their large eyes, all glistening grey and bright,    And sailing pinions.    —Upon such a shrine What are our petty griefs?    —let me not number mine.     

CVII.

   Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grown    Matted and massed together, hillocks heaped    On what were chambers, arch crushed, column strown    In fragments, choked-up vaults, and frescoes steeped    In subterranean damps, where the owl peeped,    Deeming it midnight:—Temples, baths, or halls?    Pronounce who can; for all that Learning reaped    From her research hath been, that these are walls— Behold the Imperial Mount!    'tis thus the mighty falls.     

CVIII.

   There is the moral of all human tales:    'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,    First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,    Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.    And History, with all her volumes vast,    Hath but ONE page,—'tis better written here,    Where gorgeous Tyranny hath thus amassed    All treasures, all delights, that eye or ear, Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask—Away with words!    draw near, 

CIX.

   Admire, exult—despise—laugh, weep—for here    There is such matter for all feeling:—Man!    Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear,    Ages and realms are crowded in this span,    This mountain, whose obliterated plan    The pyramid of empires pinnacled,    Of Glory's gewgaws shining in the van    Till the sun's rays with added flame were filled!    Where are its golden roofs?    where those who dared to build?     

CX.

   Tully was not so eloquent as thou,    Thou nameless column with the buried base!    What are the laurels of the Caesar's brow?    Crown me with ivy from his dwelling-place.    Whose arch or pillar meets me in the face,    Titus or Trajan's?    No; 'tis that of Time:    Triumph, arch, pillar, all he doth displace,    Scoffing; and apostolic statues climb To crush the imperial urn, whose ashes slept sublime, 

CXI.

   Buried in air, the deep blue sky of Rome,    And looking to the stars; they had contained    A spirit which with these would find a home,    The last of those who o'er the whole earth reigned,    The Roman globe, for after none sustained    But yielded back his conquests:—he was more    Than a mere Alexander, and unstained    With household blood and wine, serenely wore His sovereign virtues—still we Trajan's name adore.     

CXII.

   Where is the rock of Triumph, the high place    Where Rome embraced her heroes?    where the steep    Tarpeian—fittest goal of Treason's race,    The promontory whence the traitor's leap    Cured all ambition?    Did the Conquerors heap    Their spoils here?    Yes; and in yon field below,    A thousand years of silenced factions sleep—    The Forum, where the immortal accents glow, And still the eloquent air breathes—burns with Cicero!     

CXIII.

   The field of freedom, faction, fame, and blood:    Here a proud people's passions were exhaled,    From the first hour of empire in the bud    To that when further worlds to conquer failed;    But long before had Freedom's face been veiled,    And Anarchy assumed her attributes:    Till every lawless soldier who assailed    Trod on the trembling Senate's slavish mutes, Or raised the venal voice of baser prostitutes.     

CXIV.

   Then turn we to our latest tribune's name,    From her ten thousand tyrants turn to thee,    Redeemer of dark centuries of shame—    The friend of Petrarch—hope of Italy—    Rienzi!    last of Romans!    While the tree    Of freedom's withered trunk puts forth a leaf,    Even for thy tomb a garland let it be—    The forum's champion, and the people's chief— Her new-born Numa thou, with reign, alas!    too brief.     

CXV.

   Egeria!    sweet creation of some heart    Which found no mortal resting-place so fair    As thine ideal breast; whate'er thou art    Or wert,—a young Aurora of the air,    The nympholepsy of some fond despair;    Or, it might be, a beauty of the earth,    Who found a more than common votary there    Too much adoring; whatsoe'er thy birth, Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.     

CXVI.

   The mosses of thy fountain still are sprinkled    With thine Elysian water-drops; the face    Of thy cave-guarded spring, with years unwrinkled,    Reflects the meek-eyed genius of the place,    Whose green wild margin now no more erase    Art's works; nor must the delicate waters sleep,    Prisoned in marble, bubbling from the base    Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap The rill runs o'er, and round, fern, flowers, and ivy creep, 

CXVII.

   Fantastically tangled; the green hills    Are clothed with early blossoms, through the grass    The quick-eyed lizard rustles, and the bills    Of summer birds sing welcome as ye pass;    Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class,    Implore the pausing step, and with their dyes    Dance in the soft breeze in a fairy mass;    The sweetness of the violet's deep blue eyes, Kissed by the breath of heaven, seems coloured by its skies.     

CXVIII.

   Here didst thou dwell, in this enchanted cover,    Egeria!    thy all heavenly bosom beating    For the far footsteps of thy mortal lover;    The purple Midnight veiled that mystic meeting    With her most starry canopy, and seating    Thyself by thine adorer, what befell?    This cave was surely shaped out for the greeting    Of an enamoured Goddess, and the cell Haunted by holy Love—the earliest oracle!     

CXIX.

   And didst thou not, thy breast to his replying,    Blend a celestial with a human heart;    And Love, which dies as it was born, in sighing,    Share with immortal transports?    could thine art    Make them indeed immortal, and impart    The purity of heaven to earthly joys,    Expel the venom and not blunt the dart—    The dull satiety which all destroys— And root from out the soul the deadly weed which cloys?     

CXX.

   Alas!    our young affections run to waste,    Or water but the desert:  whence arise    But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares of haste,    Rank at the core, though tempting to the eyes,    Flowers whose wild odours breathe but agonies,    And trees whose gums are poison; such the plants    Which spring beneath her steps as Passion flies    O'er the world's wilderness, and vainly pants For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants.     

CXXI.

   O Love!    no habitant of earth thou art—    An unseen seraph, we believe in thee,—    A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,    But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see,    The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;    The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven,    Even with its own desiring phantasy,    And to a thought such shape and image given, As haunts the unquenched soul—parched—wearied—wrung—and riven.     

CXXII.

   Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,    And fevers into false creation;—where,    Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized?    In him alone.    Can Nature show so fair?    Where are the charms and virtues which we dare    Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,    The unreached Paradise of our despair,    Which o'er-informs the pencil and the pen, And overpowers the page where it would bloom again.     

CXXIII.

   Who loves, raves—'tis youth's frenzy—but the cure    Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds    Which robed our idols, and we see too sure    Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's    Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds    The fatal spell, and still it draws us on,    Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds;    The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun, Seems ever near the prize—wealthiest when most undone.     

CXXIV.

   We wither from our youth, we gasp away—    Sick—sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst,    Though to the last, in verge of our decay,    Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first—    But all too late,—so are we doubly curst.    Love, fame, ambition, avarice—'tis the same—    Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst—    For all are meteors with a different name, And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.     

CXXV.

   Few—none—find what they love or could have loved:    Though accident, blind contact, and the strong    Necessity of loving, have removed    Antipathies—but to recur, ere long,    Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;    And Circumstance, that unspiritual god    And miscreator, makes and helps along    Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod, Whose touch turns hope to dust—the dust we all have trod.     

CXXVI.

   Our life is a false nature—'tis not in    The harmony of things,—this hard decree,    This uneradicable taint of sin,    This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,    Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be    The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew—    Disease, death, bondage, all the woes we see—    And worse, the woes we see not—which throb through The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.     

CXXVII.

   Yet let us ponder boldly—'tis a base    Abandonment of reason to resign    Our right of thought—our last and only place    Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine:    Though from our birth the faculty divine    Is chained and tortured—cabined, cribbed, confined,    And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine    Too brightly on the unprepared mind, The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind.     

CXXVIII.

   Arches on arches!    as it were that Rome,    Collecting the chief trophies of her line,    Would build up all her triumphs in one dome,    Her Coliseum stands; the moonbeams shine    As 'twere its natural torches, for divine    Should be the light which streams here, to illume    This long explored but still exhaustless mine    Of contemplation; and the azure gloom Of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume 

CXXIX.

   Hues which have words, and speak to ye of heaven,    Floats o'er this vast and wondrous monument,    And shadows forth its glory.    There is given    Unto the things of earth, which Time hath bent,    A spirit's feeling, and where he hath leant    His hand, but broke his scythe, there is a power    And magic in the ruined battlement,    For which the palace of the present hour Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower.     

CXXX.

   O Time!    the beautifier of the dead,    Adorner of the ruin, comforter    And only healer when the heart hath bled—    Time!    the corrector where our judgments err,    The test of truth, love,—sole philosopher,    For all beside are sophists, from thy thrift,    Which never loses though it doth defer—    Time, the avenger!    unto thee I lift My hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave of thee a gift: 

CXXXI.

   Amidst this wreck, where thou hast made a shrine    And temple more divinely desolate,    Among thy mightier offerings here are mine,    Ruins of years—though few, yet full of fate:    If thou hast ever seen me too elate,    Hear me not; but if calmly I have borne    Good, and reserved my pride against the hate    Which shall not whelm me, let me not have worn This iron in my soul in vain—shall THEY not mourn?     

CXXXII.

   And thou, who never yet of human wrong    Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis!    Here, where the ancients paid thee homage long—    Thou, who didst call the Furies from the abyss,    And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss    For that unnatural retribution—just,    Had it but been from hands less near—in this    Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!    Dost thou not hear my heart?    —Awake!    thou shalt, and must.     

CXXXIII.

   It is not that I may not have incurred    For my ancestral faults or mine the wound    I bleed withal, and had it been conferred    With a just weapon, it had flowed unbound.    But now my blood shall not sink in the ground;    To thee I do devote it—THOU shalt take    The vengeance, which shall yet be sought and found,    Which if I have not taken for the sake— But let that pass—I sleep, but thou shalt yet awake.   

CXXXIV.

   And if my voice break forth, 'tis not that now    I shrink from what is suffered:  let him speak    Who hath beheld decline upon my brow,    Or seen my mind's convulsion leave it weak;    But in this page a record will I seek.    Not in the air shall these my words disperse,    Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak    The deep prophetic fulness of this verse, And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse!     

CXXXV.

   That curse shall be forgiveness.    —Have I not—    Hear me, my mother Earth!    behold it, Heaven!    —    Have I not had to wrestle with my lot?    Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?    Have I not had my brain seared, my heart riven,    Hopes sapped, name blighted, Life's life lied away?    And only not to desperation driven,    Because not altogether of such clay As rots into the souls of those whom I survey.     

CXXXVI.

   From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy    Have I not seen what human things could do?    From the loud roar of foaming calumny    To the small whisper of the as paltry few    And subtler venom of the reptile crew,    The Janus glance of whose significant eye,    Learning to lie with silence, would SEEM true,    And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh, Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy.     

CXXXVII.

   But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:    My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,    And my frame perish even in conquering pain,    But there is that within me which shall tire    Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire:    Something unearthly, which they deem not of,    Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre,    Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.     

CXXXVIII.

   The seal is set.    —Now welcome, thou dread Power    Nameless, yet thus omnipotent, which here    Walk'st in the shadow of the midnight hour    With a deep awe, yet all distinct from fear:    Thy haunts are ever where the dead walls rear    Their ivy mantles, and the solemn scene    Derives from thee a sense so deep and clear    That we become a part of what has been, And grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen.     

CXXXIX.

   And here the buzz of eager nations ran,    In murmured pity, or loud-roared applause,    As man was slaughtered by his fellow-man.    And wherefore slaughtered?    wherefore, but because    Such were the bloody circus' genial laws,    And the imperial pleasure.    —Wherefore not?    What matters where we fall to fill the maws    Of worms—on battle-plains or listed spot?    Both are but theatres where the chief actors rot.     

CXL.

   I see before me the Gladiator lie:    He leans upon his hand—his manly brow    Consents to death, but conquers agony,    And his drooped head sinks gradually low—    And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow    From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,    Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now    The arena swims around him:  he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won.     

CXLI.

   He heard it, but he heeded not—his eyes    Were with his heart, and that was far away;    He recked not of the life he lost nor prize,    But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,    THERE were his young barbarians all at play,    THERE was their Dacian mother—he, their sire,    Butchered to make a Roman holiday—    All this rushed with his blood—Shall he expire, And unavenged?    —Arise!    ye Goths, and glut your ire!     

CXLII.

   But here, where murder breathed her bloody steam;    And here, where buzzing nations choked the ways,    And roared or murmured like a mountain-stream    Dashing or winding as its torrent strays;    Here, where the Roman million's blame or praise    Was death or life, the playthings of a crowd,    My voice sounds much—and fall the stars' faint rays    On the arena void—seats crushed, walls bowed, And galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud.     

CXLIII.

   A ruin—yet what ruin!    from its mass    Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been reared;    Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,    And marvel where the spoil could have appeared.    Hath it indeed been plundered, or but cleared?    Alas!    developed, opens the decay,    When the colossal fabric's form is neared:    It will not bear the brightness of the day, Which streams too much on all, years, man, have reft away.     

CXLIV.

   But when the rising moon begins to climb    Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;    When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,    And the low night-breeze waves along the air,    The garland-forest, which the grey walls wear,    Like laurels on the bald first Caesar's head;    When the light shines serene, but doth not glare,    Then in this magic circle raise the dead: Heroes have trod this spot—'tis on their dust ye tread.     

CXLV.

   'While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;    When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;    And when Rome falls—the World.'    From our own land    Thus spake the pilgrims o'er this mighty wall    In Saxon times, which we are wont to call    Ancient; and these three mortal things are still    On their foundations, and unaltered all;    Rome and her Ruin past Redemption's skill, The World, the same wide den—of thieves, or what ye will.     

CXLVI.

   Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime—    Shrine of all saints and temple of all gods,    From Jove to Jesus—spared and blest by time;    Looking tranquillity, while falls or nods    Arch, empire, each thing round thee, and man plods    His way through thorns to ashes—glorious dome!    Shalt thou not last?    —Time's scythe and tyrants' rods    Shiver upon thee—sanctuary and home Of art and piety—Pantheon!    —pride of Rome!     

CXLVII.

   Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts!    Despoiled yet perfect, with thy circle spreads    A holiness appealing to all hearts—    To art a model; and to him who treads    Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds    Her light through thy sole aperture; to those    Who worship, here are altars for their beads;    And they who feel for genius may repose Their eyes on honoured forms, whose busts around them close.     

CXLVIII.

   There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light    What do I gaze on?    Nothing:  Look again!    Two forms are slowly shadowed on my sight—    Two insulated phantoms of the brain:    It is not so:  I see them full and plain—    An old man, and a female young and fair,    Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose vein    The blood is nectar:—but what doth she there, With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?     

CXLIX.

   Full swells the deep pure fountain of young life,    Where ON the heart and FROM the heart we took    Our first and sweetest nurture, when the wife,    Blest into mother, in the innocent look,    Or even the piping cry of lips that brook    No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives    Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook    She sees her little bud put forth its leaves— What may the fruit be yet?    —I know not—Cain was Eve's.     

CL.

   But here youth offers to old age the food,    The milk of his own gift:—it is her sire    To whom she renders back the debt of blood    Born with her birth.    No; he shall not expire    While in those warm and lovely veins the fire    Of health and holy feeling can provide    Great Nature's Nile, whose deep stream rises higher    Than Egypt's river:—from that gentle side Drink, drink and live, old man!    heaven's realm holds no such tide.     

CLI.

   The starry fable of the milky way    Has not thy story's purity; it is    A constellation of a sweeter ray,    And sacred Nature triumphs more in this    Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss    Where sparkle distant worlds:—Oh, holiest nurse!    No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss    To thy sire's heart, replenishing its source With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.     

CLII.

   Turn to the mole which Hadrian reared on high,    Imperial mimic of old Egypt's piles,    Colossal copyist of deformity,    Whose travelled phantasy from the far Nile's    Enormous model, doomed the artist's toils    To build for giants, and for his vain earth,    His shrunken ashes, raise this dome:  How smiles    The gazer's eye with philosophic mirth, To view the huge design which sprung from such a birth!     

CLIII.

   But lo!    the dome—the vast and wondrous dome,    To which Diana's marvel was a cell—    Christ's mighty shrine above his martyr's tomb!    I have beheld the Ephesian's miracle—    Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell    The hyaena and the jackal in their shade;    I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell    Their glittering mass i' the sun, and have surveyed Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem prayed; 

CLIV.

   But thou, of temples old, or altars new,    Standest alone—with nothing like to thee—    Worthiest of God, the holy and the true,    Since Zion's desolation, when that he    Forsook his former city, what could be,    Of earthly structures, in his honour piled,    Of a sublimer aspect?    Majesty,    Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty, all are aisled In this eternal ark of worship undefiled.     

CLV.

   Enter:  its grandeur overwhelms thee not;    And why?    it is not lessened; but thy mind,    Expanded by the genius of the spot,    Has grown colossal, and can only find    A fit abode wherein appear enshrined    Thy hopes of immortality; and thou    Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined,    See thy God face to face, as thou dost now His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.     

CLVI.

   Thou movest—but increasing with th' advance,    Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise,    Deceived by its gigantic elegance;    Vastness which grows—but grows to harmonise—    All musical in its immensities;    Rich marbles—richer painting—shrines where flame    The lamps of gold—and haughty dome which vies    In air with Earth's chief structures, though their frame Sits on the firm-set ground—and this the clouds must claim.     

CLVII.

   Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break    To separate contemplation, the great whole;    And as the ocean many bays will make,    That ask the eye—so here condense thy soul    To more immediate objects, and control    Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart    Its eloquent proportions, and unroll    In mighty graduations, part by part, The glory which at once upon thee did not dart.     

CLVIII.

   Not by its fault—but thine:  Our outward sense    Is but of gradual grasp—and as it is    That what we have of feeling most intense    Outstrips our faint expression; e'en so this    Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice    Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great    Defies at first our nature's littleness,    Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.     

CLIX.

   Then pause and be enlightened; there is more    In such a survey than the sating gaze    Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore    The worship of the place, or the mere praise    Of art and its great masters, who could raise    What former time, nor skill, nor thought could plan;    The fountain of sublimity displays    Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of man Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions can.     

CLX.

   Or, turning to the Vatican, go see    Laocoon's torture dignifying pain—    A father's love and mortal's agony    With an immortal's patience blending:—Vain    The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain    And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp,    The old man's clench; the long envenomed chain    Rivets the living links,—the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.     

CLXI.

   Or view the Lord of the unerring bow,    The God of life, and poesy, and light—    The Sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow    All radiant from his triumph in the fight;    The shaft hath just been shot—the arrow bright    With an immortal's vengeance; in his eye    And nostril beautiful disdain, and might    And majesty, flash their full lightnings by, Developing in that one glance the Deity.     

CLXII.

   But in his delicate form—a dream of Love,    Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast    Longed for a deathless lover from above,    And maddened in that vision—are expressed    All that ideal beauty ever blessed    The mind within its most unearthly mood,    When each conception was a heavenly guest—    A ray of immortality—and stood Starlike, around, until they gathered to a god?     

CLXIII.

   And if it be Prometheus stole from heaven    The fire which we endure, it was repaid    By him to whom the energy was given    Which this poetic marble hath arrayed    With an eternal glory—which, if made    By human hands, is not of human thought    And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor laid    One ringlet in the dust—nor hath it caught A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought.     

CLXIV.

   But where is he, the pilgrim of my song,    The being who upheld it through the past?    Methinks he cometh late and tarries long.    He is no more—these breathings are his last;    His wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast,    And he himself as nothing:—if he was    Aught but a phantasy, and could be classed    With forms which live and suffer—let that pass— His shadow fades away into Destruction's mass, 

CLXV.

   Which gathers shadow, substance, life, and all    That we inherit in its mortal shroud,    And spreads the dim and universal pall    Thro' which all things grow phantoms; and the cloud    Between us sinks and all which ever glowed,    Till Glory's self is twilight, and displays    A melancholy halo scarce allowed    To hover on the verge of darkness; rays Sadder than saddest night, for they distract the gaze, 

CLXVI.

   And send us prying into the abyss,    To gather what we shall be when the frame    Shall be resolved to something less than this    Its wretched essence; and to dream of fame,    And wipe the dust from off the idle name    We never more shall hear,—but never more,    Oh, happier thought!    can we be made the same:    It is enough, in sooth, that ONCE we bore These fardels of the heart—the heart whose sweat was gore.     

CLXVII.

   Hark!    forth from the abyss a voice proceeds,    A long, low distant murmur of dread sound,    Such as arises when a nation bleeds    With some deep and immedicable wound;    Through storm and darkness yawns the rending ground.    The gulf is thick with phantoms, but the chief    Seems royal still, though with her head discrowned,    And pale, but lovely, with maternal grief She clasps a babe, to whom her breast yields no relief.     

CLXVIII.

   Scion of chiefs and monarchs, where art thou?    Fond hope of many nations, art thou dead?    Could not the grave forget thee, and lay low    Some less majestic, less beloved head?    In the sad midnight, while thy heart still bled,    The mother of a moment, o'er thy boy,    Death hushed that pang for ever:  with thee fled    The present happiness and promised joy Which filled the imperial isles so full it seemed to cloy.     

CLXIX.

   Peasants bring forth in safety.    —Can it be,    O thou that wert so happy, so adored!    Those who weep not for kings shall weep for thee,    And Freedom's heart, grown heavy, cease to hoard    Her many griefs for One; for she had poured    Her orisons for thee, and o'er thy head    Beheld her Iris.    —Thou, too, lonely lord,    And desolate consort—vainly wert thou wed!    The husband of a year!    the father of the dead!     

CLXX.

   Of sackcloth was thy wedding garment made:    Thy bridal's fruit is ashes; in the dust    The fair-haired Daughter of the Isles is laid,    The love of millions!    How we did entrust    Futurity to her!    and, though it must    Darken above our bones, yet fondly deemed    Our children should obey her child, and blessed    Her and her hoped-for seed, whose promise seemed Like star to shepherd's eyes; 'twas but a meteor beamed.     

CLXXI.

   Woe unto us, not her; for she sleeps well:    The fickle reek of popular breath, the tongue    Of hollow counsel, the false oracle,    Which from the birth of monarchy hath rung    Its knell in princely ears, till the o'erstrung    Nations have armed in madness, the strange fate    Which tumbles mightiest sovereigns, and hath flung    Against their blind omnipotence a weight Within the opposing scale, which crushes soon or late,— 

CLXXII.

   These might have been her destiny; but no,    Our hearts deny it:  and so young, so fair,    Good without effort, great without a foe;    But now a bride and mother—and now THERE!    How many ties did that stern moment tear!    From thy Sire's to his humblest subject's breast    Is linked the electric chain of that despair,    Whose shock was as an earthquake's, and oppressed The land which loved thee so, that none could love thee best.     

CLXXIII.

   Lo, Nemi!    navelled in the woody hills    So far, that the uprooting wind which tears    The oak from his foundation, and which spills    The ocean o'er its boundary, and bears    Its foam against the skies, reluctant spares    The oval mirror of thy glassy lake;    And, calm as cherished hate, its surface wears    A deep cold settled aspect nought can shake, All coiled into itself and round, as sleeps the snake.     

CLXXIV.

   And near Albano's scarce divided waves    Shine from a sister valley;—and afar    The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves    The Latian coast where sprung the Epic war,    'Arms and the Man,' whose reascending star    Rose o'er an empire,—but beneath thy right    Tully reposed from Rome;—and where yon bar    Of girdling mountains intercepts the sight, The Sabine farm was tilled, the weary bard's delight.     

CLXXV.

   But I forget.    —My pilgrim's shrine is won,    And he and I must part,—so let it be,—    His task and mine alike are nearly done;    Yet once more let us look upon the sea:    The midland ocean breaks on him and me,    And from the Alban mount we now behold    Our friend of youth, that ocean, which when we    Beheld it last by Calpe's rock unfold Those waves, we followed on till the dark Euxine rolled 

CLXXVI.

   Upon the blue Symplegades:  long years—    Long, though not very many—since have done    Their work on both; some suffering and some tears    Have left us nearly where we had begun:    Yet not in vain our mortal race hath run,    We have had our reward—and it is here;    That we can yet feel gladdened by the sun,    And reap from earth, sea, joy almost as dear As if there were no man to trouble what is clear.     

CLXXVII.

   Oh!    that the Desert were my dwelling-place,    With one fair Spirit for my minister,    That I might all forget the human race,    And, hating no one, love but only her!    Ye Elements!    —in whose ennobling stir    I feel myself exalted—can ye not    Accord me such a being?    Do I err    In deeming such inhabit many a spot?    Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.     

CLXXVIII.

   There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,    There is a rapture on the lonely shore,    There is society where none intrudes,    By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:    I love not Man the less, but Nature more,    From these our interviews, in which I steal    From all I may be, or have been before,    To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.     

CLXXIX.

   Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!    Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;    Man marks the earth with ruin—his control    Stops with the shore;—upon the watery plain    The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain    A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,    When for a moment, like a drop of rain,    He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.     

CLXXX.

   His steps are not upon thy paths,—thy fields    Are not a spoil for him,—thou dost arise    And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields    For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,    Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,    And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray    And howling, to his gods, where haply lies    His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth:—there let him lay.     

CLXXXI.

   The armaments which thunderstrike the walls    Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,    And monarchs tremble in their capitals.    The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make    Their clay creator the vain title take    Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;    These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,    They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.     

CLXXXII.

   Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—    Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?    Thy waters washed them power while they were free    And many a tyrant since:  their shores obey    The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay    Has dried up realms to deserts:  not so thou,    Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play—    Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow— Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.     

CLXXXIII.

   Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form    Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,    Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,    Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime    Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless, and sublime—    The image of Eternity—the throne    Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime    The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee:  thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.     

CLXXXIV.

   And I have loved thee, Ocean!    and my joy    Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be    Borne like thy bubbles, onward:  from a boy    I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me    Were a delight; and if the freshening sea    Made them a terror—'twas a pleasing fear,    For I was as it were a child of thee,    And trusted to thy billows far and near, And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here.     

CLXXXV.

   My task is done—my song hath ceased—my theme    Has died into an echo; it is fit    The spell should break of this protracted dream.    The torch shall be extinguished which hath lit    My midnight lamp—and what is writ, is writ—    Would it were worthier!    but I am not now    That which I have been—and my visions flit    Less palpably before me—and the glow Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low.     

CLXXXVI.

   Farewell!    a word that must be, and hath been—    A sound which makes us linger; yet, farewell!    Ye, who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene    Which is his last, if in your memories dwell    A thought which once was his, if on ye swell    A single recollection, not in vain    He wore his sandal-shoon and scallop shell;    Farewell!    with HIM alone may rest the pain, If such there were—with YOU, the moral of his strain.     

Footnote:

{1} Lady Charlotte Harley, daughter of the Earl of Oxford.