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 That what we have of feeling most intense Fools our fond gaze, and, greatest of the great, Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate SIR WALTER SCOTT AT THE TOMB OF THE STUARTS. VE'S tinted shadows slowly fill the fane EVE'S Where Art has taken almost Nature's room, A sculptured tomb of regal heads discrowned, There lie the Stuarts! There lingers Walter Scott! He is with those who felt their life was sere, He rests his chin upon a sturdy staff, Each figure in its pictured place is seen, O grace of life, which shame could never mar! Pure is the neck that wears the deathly scar, But purpled mantle and blood-crimsoned shroud, Are gone, like dreams by daylight disallowed; A few more moments, and that laboring brow Thus, face to face, the dying and the dead, Lord Houghton. TEMP THE ILLUMINATIONS OF ST. PETER'S. I. FIRST ILLUMINATION. EMPLE! where Time has wed Eternity, But yet how sweet the hardly waking sense, That when the strength of hours has quenched those gems, Disparted all those soft-bright diadems, Still in the sun thy form will rise supreme In its own solid, clear magnificence, Divinest substance then, as now divinest dream. II. SECOND ILLUMINATION. My heart was resting with a peaceful gaze, Paled to annihilation, and my eye, Stunned by the splendor, saw against the sky Nothing but light, — sheer light, and light's own haze. At last that giddying sight took form, and then Appeared the stable vision of a crown, From the black vault by unseen power let down, Cities of men, was ever brow Of mortal birth adorned as Rome is now? ST. PETER'S BY MOONLIGHT. Lord Houghton. Low hung the moon when first I stood in Rome; Midway she seemed attracted from her sphere, On those twin fountains shining broad and clear Whose floods, not mindless of their mountain home, Rise there in clouds of rainbow mist and foam. That hour fulfilled the dream of many a year: Through that thin mist, with joy akin to fear, The steps I saw, the pillars, last, the dome. A spiritual empire there embodied stood; The Roman Church there met me face to face: Ages, sealed up, of evil and of good Slept in that circling colonnade's embrace. Alone I stood, a stranger and alone, Changed by that stony miracle to stone. Aubrey de Vere. A IN ST. PETER'S. NOBLE structure truly! as you say, Clear, spacious, large in feeling and design, Just what a church should be, I grant alway There may be faults, great faults, yet I opine Less on the whole than elsewhere may be found But let its faults go, out of human thought Was nothing ever builded, written, wrought That one can say is whole, complete, and round; Your snarling critic gloats upon defects, And any fool among the architects Can pick you out a hundred different flaws; Seen from without, how well it bodies forth Rome's proud religion, — nothing mean and small In its proportion, and above it all A central dome of thought, a forehead bare That rises in this soft Italian air Big with its intellect, and far away, When lesser domes have sunken in the earth, An art-born brother of the mountains there. To the world's pilgrims, be they foes or friends. |