Then shall thy children exult in a jubilee holier, grander, And thy brief carnival pleasures seem but the sport of a school-boy
To the true freedom that then shall crown thee with
Christopher Pearse Cranch.
stand before the dwelling of a man
Who proved, ere meteor-like his spirit fled,
Through Rome's live heart the blood of freedom ran;
That, with the dust of ages o'er her spread,
Prostrate and chained, the Helot was not dead;
A resurrection of futurity
Awaiting yet to raise her buried head,
Cola Rienzi! was reserved for thee:
To breathe into her veins the life of liberty.
Here like a fallen angel mid the wreck
Of a crushed world thou stood'st, evoking forth
Passionate words that waited at thy beck
To raise the fiends hate, vengeance, into birth,
And the old memories of heroic worth:
The skeleton fragments of Rome's giant power Recalled the minds that once o'erruled the earth; The freemen heard, the spirit that made cower Tyrants, awoke again the Nemesis of the hour.
Patriot, sage, poet, orator, each part
Was subtly played, all save the unattained,
The greatest, the unfelt, the hero heart:
Dazzled wert thou thy giddy eminence gained,
While flattery whispered that the Tribune reigned.
Foes mocked thee: patriots saw their liberty
By crime and vanity and folly stained;
Failure, flight, cowardice, apostasy,
Proved what thou wert too late, vain martyr of the free!
UT 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 hyena 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.
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 honor 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 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.
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 harmonize,
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.
Lord Byron.
SIR WALTER SCOTT AT THE TOMB OF THE STUARTS.
VE'S tinted shadows slowly fill the fane
Where Art has taken almost Nature's room,
While still two objects clear in light remain,
An alien pilgrim at an alien tomb, —
A sculptured tomb of regal heads discrowned,
Of one heart-worshipped, fancy-haunted name,
Once loud on earth, but now scarce else renowned
Than as the offspring of that stranger's fame.
There lie the Stuarts! There lingers Walter Scott!
Strange congress of illustrious thoughts and things!
A plain old moral, still too oft forgot,-
The power of genius and the fall of kings.
The curse on lawless will high-planted there,
A beacon to the world, shines not for him ;
He is with those who felt their life was sere,
When the full light of loyalty grew dim.
He rests his chin upon a sturdy staff,
Historic as that sceptre, theirs no more;
His gaze is fixed; his thirsty heart can quaff,
For a short hour the spirit-draughts of yore.
Each figure in its pictured place is seen,
Each fancied shape his actual vision fills,
From the long-pining, death-delivered queen
To the worn outlaw of the heathery hills.
O grace of life, which shame could never mar!
O dignity, that circumstance defied!
Pure is the neck that wears the deathly scar,
And sorrow has baptized the front of pride.
But purpled mantle and blood-crimsoned shroud,
Exiles to suffer and returns to woo,
Are gone, like dreams by daylight disallowed;
And their historian, he is sinking too!
A few more moments, and that laboring brow
Cold as those royal busts and calm will lie;
And, as on them his thoughts are resting now,
His marbled form will meet the attentive eye.
Thus, face to face, the dying and the dead,
Bound in one solemn, ever-living bond,
Communed; and I was sad that ancient head
Ever should pass those holy walls beyond.
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