For on the night that they were buried, she Restored the embalmers' ruining, and shook The light out of the funeral lamps, to be
A mimic day within that deathy nook; And she unwound the woven imagery
Of second childhood's swaddling bands, and took The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche, And threw it with contempt into a ditch.
And there the body lay, age after age,
Mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying, Like one asleep in a green hermitage,
With gentle sleep about its eyelids playing, And living in its dreams beyond the rage
Of death or life; while they were still arraying In liveries ever new the rapid, blind,
And fleeting generations of mankind.
And she would write strange dreams upon the brain Of those who were less beautiful, and make All harsh and crooked purposes more vain Than in the desert is the serpent's wake Which the sand covers,-all his evil gain
The miser in such dreams would rise and shake Into a beggar's lap ;-the lying scribe Would his own lies betray without a bribe.
The priests would write an explanation full, Translating hieroglyphics into Greek, How the god Apis really was a bull,
And nothing more; and bid the herald stick The same against the temple doors, and pull
The old cant down; they licensed all to speak Whate'er they thought of hawks, and cats, and geese, By pastoral letters to each diocese.
The king would dress an ape up in his crown And robes, and seat him on his glorious seat, And on the right hand of the sunlike throne Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat The chatterings of the monkey.-Every one
Of the prone courtiers crawled to kiss the feet Of their great Emperor when the morning came; And kissed-alas, how many kiss the same!
And then the Witch would let them take no ill: Of many thousand schemes which lovers find The Witch found one,--and so they took their fill Of happiness in marriage warm and kind. Friends who, by practice of some envious skill, Were torn apart, a wide wound, mind from She did unite again with visions clear [mind Of deep affection and of truth sincere.
These were the pranks she played among the cities Of mortal men, and what she did to sprites
And Gods, entangling them in her sweet ditties,
To do her will, and show their subtle slights, I will declare another time; for it is
A tale more fit for the weird winter nights— Than for these garish summer days, when we Scarcely believe much more than we can see.
I STOOD within the city disinterred +;
And heard the autumnal leaves like light foot- falls
Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard The Mountain's slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls;
The oracular thunder penetrating shook
The listening soul in my suspended blood;
I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke- I felt, but heard not :-through white columns The isle-sustaining Ocean flood, [glowed
A plane of light between two heavens of azure: Around me gleamed many a bright sepulchre Of whose pure beauty, Time, as if his pleasure Were to spare Death, had never made erasure; But every living lineament was clear As in the sculptor's thought; and there The wreaths of stony myrtle, ivy and pine, Like winter leaves o'ergrown by moulded snow, Seemed only not to move and grow
Because the crystal silence of the air
Weighed on their life; even as the Power divine, Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.
Then gentle winds arose, With many a mingled close
And where the Baian ocean Welters with air-like motion,
The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths, Of wild Æolian sound and mountain odour keen ; Walked out of quarters in somnambulism, [and Round the red anvils you might see them stand Like Cyclopses in Vulcan's sooty abysm, Beating their swords to ploughshares;-in a band The gaolers sent those of the liberal schism Free through the streets of Memphis; much, I wis, To the annoyance of king Amasis.
And timid lovers who had been so coy,
They hardly knew whether they loved or not, Would rise out of their rest, and take sweet joy, To the fulfilment of their inmost thought; And when next day the maiden and the boy
Met one another, both, like sinners caught, Blushed at the thing which each believed was Only in fancy-till the tenth moon shone; [done
Within, above, around its bowers of starry green, Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves, Even as the ever stormless atmosphere Floats o'er the Elysian realm,
It bore me like an Angel, o'er the waves Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air
* The Author has connected many recollections of his visit to Pompeii and Baie with the enthusiasm excited by the intelligence of the proclamation of a Constitutional Government at Naples. This has given a tinge of pic- turesque and descriptive imagery to the introductory Epodes, which depicture the scenes and some of the majestic feelings permanently connected with the scene of this animating event.-Author's Note. + Pompeii.
No storm can overwhelm ; I sailed where ever flows Under the calm Serene A spirit of deep emotion, From the unknown graves
Of the dead kings of Melody *. Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm The horizontal æther; heaven stript bare Its depths over Elysium, where the prow Made the invisible water white as snow; From that Typhæan mount, Inarime, There streamed a sunlike vapour, like the standard Of some ethereal host; Whilst from all the coast,
Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered Over the oracular woods and divine sea Prophesyings which grew articulate
They seize me-I must speak them;-be they fate!
NAPLES! thou Heart of men, which ever pantest Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven! Elysian City, which to calm enchantest
The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even As sleep round Love, are driven ! Metropolis of a ruined Paradise
Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained! Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice,
Which armed Victory offers up unstained To Love, the flower-enchained!
Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be, Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free, If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail. Hail, hail, all hail !
Strip every impious gawd, rend Error veil by veil : O'er Ruin desolate,
O'er Falsehood's fallen state,
Sit thou sublime, unawed; be the Destroyer pale! And equal laws be thine,
And winged words let sail,
Freighted with truth even from the throne of God: That wealth, surviving fate, Be thine. All hail!
Didst thou not start to hear Spain's thrilling paan From land to land re-echoed solemnly, Till silence became music? From the Exan To the cold Alps, eternal Italy
Starts to hear thine! The Sea Which paves the desert streets of Venice, laughs In light and music; widowed Genoa wan, By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs, Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan, Within whose veins long ran
The viper's palsying venom, lifts her heel To bruise his head. The signal and the seal (If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail) Art Thou of all these hopes.-O hail !
As ruling once by power, so now by admiration, An athlete stript to run
From a remoter station
For the high prize lost on Philippi's shore :As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail, So now may Fraud and Wrong! O hail!
Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms Arrayed against the ever-living Gods?
The crash and darkness of a thousand storms Bursting their inaccessible abodes
Of crags and thunder clouds? See ye the banners blazoned to the day,
Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride? Dissonant threats kill Silence far away, The Serene Heaven which wraps our Eden wide With iron light is dyed,
The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions Like Chaos o'er creation, uncreating; An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions And lawless slaveries,-down the aerial regions Of the white Alps, desolating, Famished wolves that bide no waiting, Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory, Trampling our columned cities into dust, Their dull and savage lust
On Beauty's corse to sickness satiating- [hoary They come ! The fields they tread look black and With fire-from their red feet the streams run gory!
Great Spirit, deepest Love! Which rulest and dost move
* Eæa, the Island of Circe.
The viper was the armorial device of the Visconti, tyrants of Milan.
All things which live and are, within the Italian Who spreadest heaven around it, [shore; Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it; Who sittest in thy star, o'er Ocean's western floor, Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command
The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison ! From the Earth's bosom chill;
O bid those beams be each a blinding brand Of lightning bid those showers be dews of poison! Bid the Earth's plenty kill! Bid thy bright Heaven above Whilst light and darkness bound it, Be their tomb who planned To make it ours and thine!
Or, with thine harmonizing ardours fill And raise thy sons, as o'er the prone horizon Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire- Be man's high hope and unextinct desire The instrument to work thy will divine! Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leo- And frowns and fears from Thee, [pards, Would not more swiftly flee,
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds. Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine Thou yieldest or withholdest, Oh let be This City of thy worship, ever free!
DEATH is here, and death is there, Death is busy everywhere, All around, within, beneath, Above is death-and we are death.
Death has set his mark and seal On all we are and all we feel, On all we know and all we fear,
First our pleasures die-and then Our hopes, and then our fears-and when These are dead, the debt is due, Dust claims dust-and we die too.
All things that we love and cherish, Like ourselves, must fade and perish ; Such is our rude mortal lot- Love itself would, did they not.
It was a bright and cheerful afternoon, Towards the end of the sunny month of June, When the north wind congregates in crowds The floating mountains of the silver clouds From the horizon-and the stainless sky Opens beyond them like eternity.
All things rejoiced beneath the sun, the weeds, The river, and the corn-fields, and the reeds; The willow leaves that glanced in the light breeze, And the firm foliage of the larger trees.
It was a winter such as when birds die In the deep forests; and the fishes lie Stiffened in the translucent ice, which makes Even the mud and slime of the warm lakes A wrinkled clod, as hard as brick; and when, Among their children, comfortable men Gather about great fires, and yet feel cold: Alas! then for the homeless beggar old!
AMID the desolation of a city, Which was the cradle, and is now the grave, Of an extinguished people; so that pity Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave, There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave For bread, and gold, and blood: pain, linked to Agitates the light flame of their hours, Until its vital oil is spent or spilt: There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed roof, The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers Of solitary wealth! the tempest-proof Pavilions of the dark Italian air
Are by its presence dimmed-they stand aloof, And are withdrawn-so that the world is bare, As if a spectre, wrapt in shapeless terror, Amid a company of ladies fair
Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue, The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error, Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.
YE hasten to the dead! What seek ye there, Ye restless thoughts and busy purposes Of the idle brain, which the world's livery wear? O thou quick Heart, which pantest to possess All that anticipation feigneth fair!
Thou vainly curious mind which wouldest guess Whence thou didst come,and whither thou mayest go, And that which never yet was known wouldst know-
Oh, whither hasten ye, that thus ye press With such swift feet life's green and pleasant path, Seeking alike from happiness and woe
A refuge in the cavern of grey death? O heart, and mind, and thoughts! What thing do you
Hope to inherit in the grave below?
A PORTAL as of shadowy adamant
Stands yawning on the highway of the life Which we all tread, a cavern huge and gaunt; Around it rages an unceasing strife
Of shadows, like the restless clouds that haunt The gap of some cleft mountain, lifted high Into the whirlwinds of the upper sky.
At Pisa there still exists the prison of Ugolino, which goes by the name of "La Torre della Fame:" in the adjoining building the galley-slaves are confined. It is situated near the Ponte al Mare on the Arno.
ALAS! good friend, what profit can you see In hating such a hateless thing as me? There is no sport in hate where all the rage Is on one side. In vain would you assuage Your frowns upon an unresisting smile, In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile Your heart, by some faint sympathy of hate. Oh conquer what you cannot satiate! For to your passion I am far more coy Than ever yet was coldest maid or boy In winter noon. Of your antipathy If I am the Narcissus, you are free To pine into a sound with hating me.
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