Came Megara before me, and behind
Ægina lay, Piræus 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 uprear'd
Barbaric dwellings on their shatter'd site,
Which only make more mourn'd and more endear'd
The few last rays of their far-scatter'd light,
And the crush'd relics of their vanish'd might.
The Roman saw these tombs in his own age,
These sepulchers 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 perish'd states he mourn'd 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.

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 theater 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, redeem'd 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 mold:

L

We gaze and turn away, and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fulness; there forever 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.

LI

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'd 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,

Shower'd 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 learnèd 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 forever 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

Even in itself an immortality,

Though there were nothing save the past, and this

The particle of those sublimities

Which have relapsed to chaos:
Angelo's, Alfieri's bones, and his,

The starry Galileo, with his woes;

here repose

Here Machiavelli's earth return'd to whence it rose.

LV

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:

Is still impregnate with divinity,

thy decay

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, 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?

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 forevermore
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.