And to the fond idolaters of old
Envy the innate flash which such a soul
could mould:

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

Chain'd 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.

Appear'dst 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 vanquish'dLord 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,
Shower'd on his eyelids, brow, and mouth,
as from an urn?

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 recal such visions, and create,
From what has been or might be, things
which grow
Into thy statue's form, and look like gods
below.

These are four minds, which, like the elements,

Might furnish forth creation :---Italy!
Time, which hath wrong'd 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.

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, distinguish'd 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?

I leave to learned fingers and wise hands, Boccaccio to his parent earth bequeath'd
The artist and his ape, to teach and tell | His dust,-and lies it not her Great among,
How well his connoisseurship understands With many a sweet and solemn requiem
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.

In Santa Croce's holy precincts lie
Ashes which make it holier, dust which is
Even in itself an immortality,
Though there were nothing save the past,
and this,

The particle of those sublimities
Which have relaps'd to chaos :-here repose
Angelo's, Alfieri's bones, and his,
The starry Galileo's, with his woes;
Here Machiavelli's earth, return'd to whence
it rose.

breathed O'er him who form'd the Tuscan's sirentongue? That music in itself, whose sounds are song, The poetry of speech? No ;-even his tomb Uptorn, must bear the hyæna bigot's wrong, No more amidst the meaner dead find room, Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for whom!

And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust;
Yet for this want more noted, as of yore
The Cæsar'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! honour'd sleeps
The immortal exile;--Arqua, too, her store
Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps,
While Florence vainly begs her banish'd
dead and weeps.

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-

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 A little rill of scanty stream and bed-
Freshness in the green turf that wraps the A name of blood from that day's sanguine
rain;

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.

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;

And Sanguinetto tells ye where the dead Made the earth wet, and turn'd the unwilling waters red.

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

There be more marvels yet-but not for mine;
For I have been accustom'd to entwine Grazes; the purest god of gentle waters!
My thoughts with Nature rather in the fields, | And most serene of aspect, and most clear;
Than Art in galleries: though a work divine Surely that stream was unprofaned by
Calls for my spirit's homage, yet it yields

slaughters

Less than it feels, because the weapon which A mirror and a bath for Beauty's youngest it wields

daughters!

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 scatter'd water-lily
sails

Down where the shallower wave still tells
its bubbling tales.

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.

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,

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

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 abhorr'd
Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake,
The drill'd dull lesson, forced down word
by word

In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to
record

To the broad column which rolls on, and Aught that recals the daily drug which

turn'd

My sickening memory; and, though Time
hath taught

My mind to meditate what then it learn'd,
Yet such the fix'd 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.

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 touch'd
heart,

Yet fare thee well-upon Soracte's ridge
we part.

Oh 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.
The Niobe of nations! there she stands,

And in Chimari heard the thunder-hills of Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;

fear,

An empty urn within her wither'd hands,
Whose holy dust was scatter'd 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!

Th' Acroceraunian mountains of old name;
And on Parnassus seen the eagles fly
Like spirits of the spot, as 'twere for fame,
For still they soar'd unutterably high:
I've look'd 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, display'd | The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood,
Not now in snow, which asks the lyric Ro-
man's aid

For our remembrance, and from out the plain Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break,

and Fire, Have dealt upon the seven-hill'd city's pride; She saw her glories star by star expire, | And up the steep barbarian monarchs ride, Where the car climb'd the capitol; far and wide