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.
Enter its grandeur overwhelms thee not; And why? it is not lessen'd; 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.
Thou movest-but increasing with the 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.
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,
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; even 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.
Then pause, and be enlighten'd; 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.
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 envenom'd chain Rivets the living links, the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.
Or view the Lord of the unerring bow, The God of life, and poesy, and lightThe Sun in human limbs array'd, 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.
But in his delicate form-a dream of Love, Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast Long'd for a deathless lover from above, And madden'd in that vision-are exprest All that ideal beauty ever blest
The mind with in its most unearthly mood, When each conception was a heavenly guest- A ray of immortality-and stood,
Starlike, around, until they gather'd to a god!
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