FH THE POETS
II
itliSiiii
THROUGH ITALY
WITH
THE POETS
VESUVIUS AND THE BAY OF NAPLES
THROUGH ITALY
WITH
THE POETS
COMPILED BY
KOBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER
"Oh for a beaker full of the warm South!"
KEATS
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1908
Copyright, 1908, by
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
NEW YORK
Published March, 1908
IHfe PRBM1ER 1 PRESS
, . NEW 5TOE.K " '.
S3/3
FOREWORD
ITALY is the land of poetry.
No other country has so touched men of genius
to their best issues; and just as mankind has been
introduced to English history mainly by the art
of Shakspere and Scott, so Italy has come chiefly
to be known and loved in the lines of Virgil, Dante,
Shakspere, Byron, Shelley, the Brownings and
their descendants. In every part of the penin-
sula the shades of poets dead and gone hover
vaguely about the traveler, and at every turn of
the road he is exasperated by some elusive, half-
remembered line, until he comes to long for a
pocket friend who shall do for his soul what the
potent Baedeker does for body and mind.
In traveling last year the editor found this
need so pressing that he determined to gather
compactly together the most precious poems on
Italy from the different nations and centuries, ar-
ranging them in the order of a natural tour from
Verona and Milan across the lakes to the Riviera,
down the western side through Florence, Rome
and Naples to Reggio, the toe of the "boot,"
and up the eastern side, thro Taranto, Ancona
and Venice to Asolo.
vi FOREWORD
In selecting from the elder poets the editor has
been substantially aided by the three volumes on
Italy in Longfellow's "Poems of Places," published
in 1877. Since that year the tide of travel has set
so strongly toward "the warm south" that nearly
all of our contemporary poets have been inspired
in some measure by Italy. Swinburne, Aldrich,
Symonds, Symons, Wilde, Moody, Woodberry,
Lazarus, Weir Mitchell, these moderns have been
portraying Italy with a constant growth in vivid-
ness, in vigor, in delicacy, in fidelity and sensitive-
ness to the real Italian atmosphere, a growth
comparable to the rise of American painting
within the last thirty years. But, of all the re-
cent works in this volume, three poems "At
Tiber Mouth," by Sir Rennell Rodd; Carducci's
"Monte Cavo," and "Browning at Asolo," by
Robert Underwood Johnson seem to the editor
pre-eminent among modern poems of places.
The editor desires to express his appreciation
of the kindness of Mr. Gamaliel Bradford, Jr. ;
Miss Edith Thomas, Mr. Robert Underwood John-
son, Messrs. G. P. Putnams ; Houghton, Mif-
flin & Co. ; J. B. Lippincott & Co., Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, and others, who have granted him per-
mission to reprint selections from works bearing
their copyright.
R. H. S.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD v
ITALY
PRAISES OF ITALY Virgil 1
To ITALY Leopardi 3
MIGNON Goethe 5
ITALY A. C. Swinburne 6
"ITALIA, lo Ti SALUTO" C. G. Rossetti 7
THE DAISY Alfred Tennyson 7
ITALY E. B. Browning 12
To ITALY , R. U. Johnson 13
ITALIA Oscar Wilde 15
A SONG OF ITALY A. C. Swinburne 16
"DE GUSTIBUS " Robert Browning 19
VERONA
VERONA Nicholas Mitchell 21
To VERONA W. S. Landor 23
AT VERONA Oscar Wilde 24
BEFORE THE OLD CASTLE OF VERONA G. Carducci 25
MANTUA
MANTUA Dante Alighieri 27
IN THE MEADOWS AT MANTUA Arthur Symons 29
LAKE GARDA
SIRMIO Catullus 30
"FRATER AVE ATQUE VALE" Alfred Tennyson 31
vii
viii CONTENTS
BRESCIA PAGE
THE PATRIOT Robert Browning 32
MILAN
MILAN Ausonius 34
THE LAST SUPPER William Wordsworth 34
LEONARDO'S "LAST SUPPER" AT MILAN De Vere 35
ON THE ROOF OF MILAN CATHEDRAL Symonds 36
MILAN CATHEDRAL Henry G. Bell 38
ON MILAN CATHEDRAL R. H. Schauffler 39
LAKE COMO
LAKE OF COMO William Wordsworth 41
LAKE COMO Walter Malone 43
CADENABBIA H. W. Longfellow 46
LAKE VARESE
LAGO VARESE Henry Taylor 49
LAKE MAGGIORE
STANZAS Robert Southey 52
TURIN
MOTHER AND POET E. B. Browning 54
THE RIVER PO
THE Po Lucan 60
STANZAS TO THE Po Lord Byron 60
THE RIVIERA
RIVIERA DI PONENTE J. F. Clarke 63
MOONLIGHT ON THE RIVIERA Richard Leander 66
THE APENNINES
PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES.. .Percy Bysshe Shelley 69
To THE APENNINES, William Gullen Bryant 69
CONTENTS ix
SAVONA PAGE
SAVONA T. W. Parsons 72
COGOLETO
BOYHOOD OF COLUMBUS James Russell Lowell 76
GENOA
APPROACH TO GENOA Samuel Rogers 78
GENOA Aubrey de Vere 79
ON THE MONUMENT TO MAZZINI. . .A. C. Swinburne 80
GENOA W. H. Gibson 82
SONNET Oscar Wilde 83
PAVIA
CHARLEMAGNE H. W. Longfellow 84
MODENA
MODENA Alessandro Tassoni 87
GINEVRA Samuel Rogers 88
BOLOGNA
IN THE PIAZZA OF SAN PETRONIO G-iosue Carducci 92
TUSCANY
IN TUSCANY Eric MacTcay 94
TUSCAN HILLS Cora Fabbri 94
FLOKENCE
FLORENCE 8. T. Coleridge 96
FOR AN EPITAPH AT FIESOLE W. S. Landor 97
THE STATUE AND THE BUST Robert Browning 97
SANTA CROCE Lord Byron 103
SANTA MARIA NOVELLA E. B. Browning 105
THE OLD BRIDGE AT FLORENCE H. W. Longfellow 107
THE VENUS DE MEDICI Lord Byron 107
GIOTTO'S TOWER H. W. Longfellow 109
x CONTENTS
PAGE
OLD PICTURES IN FLORENCE Robert Browning 110
THE STATUE OF LORENZO DE MEDICI.. J. E. Nesmith 112
THE DUOMO Edith M. Thomas 113
SAN MINIATO Oscar Wilde 114
IN SAN LORENZO A. C. Swinburne 114
FROM "LOVE IN ITALY" J. H. Ingham 115
ARCETRI
THE TOMB OF GALILEO Walter Malone 116
THE EIVER ARNO
BY THE ARNO Oscar Wilde 118
VALLOMBROSA
VALLOMBROSA John Milton 120
VALLOMBROSA E. B. Browning 120
VALLOMBROSA Ernest Myers 122
LA VERNA
THE CONVENT OF LA VERNA B. W. Procter 123
LASTRA
LASTRA A SIGNA Sarah D. Clarke 124
PISA
IN THE PINE FOREST OF THE CASCINE Shelley 126
THE CAMP SANTO AT PISA Aubrey de Vere 129
CAMPANILE DI PISA T. W. Parsons 130
PISA: THE DUOMO S. W. Mitchell 135
BATHS OF LUCCA
WRITTEN AT THE BATHS OF LUCCA.. Lord Houghton 136
CARRARA
THE HILLS OF CARRARA.. ..John Ruskin 138
CONTENTS xi
LERICI PAGE
LINES WRITTEN NEAB SHELLEY'S HOUSE.... De Vere 141
SAN TERENZO
SAN TEBENZO Andrew Lang 144
SAN GIMIGNANO
BELOW SAN GIMIGNANO /. V. A. Mac Murray 145
SIENA
SIENA A. C. Swinburne 147
THE VILLA W. W. Story 150
MONTEPULCIANO
MONTEPULCIANO WINE Francesco Redi 153
LAKE THRASYMENE
LINES ON LAKE THRASYMENE. . .Richard C. Trench 154
THBASYMENE Charles Strong 156
FABEWELL TO TUSCANY... John Addington Symonds 156
UMBRIA
IN UMBRIA Helen J. Sanborn 159
PERUGIA
FROM PERUGIA John Oreenleaf Whittier 162
ASSISI
THE SERMON OF ST. FRANCIS H. W. Longfellow 167
AT ASSISI W. V. Moody 168
FROM ASSISI Helen J. Sanborn 170
TERNI
THE FALLS OF TERNI Lord Byron 171
xii CONTENTS
OKVIETO PAGE
AN EPISODE John Addington Symonds 173
VEII
THE DESOLATION OF VEII Bessie R. Parties 175
ROME
ROME Virgil 178
ROME John Milton 180
ROME Lord Byron 182
ROME Bessie R. Parties 184
DREAMS IN ROME Arthur Symons 187
ROMA s. W. Mitchell 187
ROME UNVISITED Oscar Wilde 189
ROME Giosut Carducci 190
ROME Arthur Symons 192
HILLS OF ROME Joachim du Bellay 192
MONTE CAVALLO A. H. Clough 193
THE (LELIAN HILL Bessie R. Parties 194
THE RUINS OF ROME Joachim du Bellay 196
THE COLISEUM Lord Byron 198
THE COLISEUM Edgar Allan Poe 202
THE ARCH OF TITUS Auorey de Vere 204
THE SHADOW OF THE OBELISK T. W. Parsons 204
THE PILLAR OF TRAJAN William Wordsworth 208
THE CORSO: THE ROMAN CARNIVAL C. P. Cranch 211
THE SCALINATA T. B. Read 215
ST. PETER'S Lord Byron 218
THE ILLUMINATIONS OF ST. PETER'S. . Lord Houghton 220
ST. JOHN LATERAN Bessie R. Parties 222
THE PANTHEON Lord Byron 223
ARA CCELI Thomas B. Aldrich 224
THE STEPS OF ARA CCELI Sully Prudhomme 225
THE VATICAN Lord Byron 226
EASTER DAY Oscar Wilde 228
Two GRAVES AT ROME F. T. Palgrave 228
FROM "LOVE IN ITALY" ... r .......,.../. H. Ingham 231
CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
THE GRAVE OF KEATS Oscar Wilde 232
THE GRAVE OF KEATS flf. W. Mitchell 233
THE GRAVE OF SHELLEY Oscar Wilde 235
PONTE SUBLICIO . . Thomas Babington Macaulay 235
Two IN THE CAMPAGNA Robert Browning 240
THE APPIAN WAY Aubrey de Vere 243
AUGUST ON THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA.. Crowninshield 243
THE CAMPAGNA FROM ST. JOHN LATERAN.. .De Vere 244
THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA flf. W. Mitchell 245
SUNSET ON THE CAMPAGNA Helen J. Sanborn 247
THE RIVER TIBER
THE TIBER Virgil 248
THE RIVER TIBER A. H. Clough 249
THE ALBAN HILLS
MONTE CAVO Giosue Carducci 252
SPRING AMONG THE ALBAN HILLS Alice Meynell 255
FRASCATI
AT THE VILLA CONTI W. W. Story 256
A VISIT TO TUSCULUM Richard Chenevix Trench 257
To THE FOUNTAIN AT FRASCATI Lord Hanmer 260
CIVITA LAVINTA (LANUVIUM)
AT LANUVIUM Rennell Rodd 261
LAKE NEMI
THE MIRROR OF DIANA Mathilde Blind 263
TIVOLI
TrvoLi J. E. Reade 266
RED POPPIES William Sharp 267
THE VILLA OF HADRIAN Gamaliel Bradford, Jr. 268
xiv CONTENTS
LICENZA PAGE
THE SABINE FARM Horace 269
"O FONS BANDUSLE" Horace 272
OSTIA
OSTIA yirgil 273
AT TIBEB MOUTH Rennell Road 273
MONTE GASSING
MONTE CASSINU H. W. Longfellow 279
CAPUA
CAPUA John Nichol 283
NAPLES
ODE TO NAPLES Percy Bysshe Shelley 285
STANZAS Percy Bysshe Shelley 289
PALM SUNDAY: NAPLES Arthur Symons 291
A NIGHT IN NAPLES Lewis Morris 292
NAPLES W. H. Gibson 294
MT. VESUVIUS
VESUVIUS Martial 296
VESUVIUS Richard Chenevix Trench 296
VESUVIUS C. P. Cranch 298
CASTELLAMAEE
AT CASTELLAMAEE John Addington Symonds 303
POMPEII
POMPEII J. E. Reade 305
A GIBL OF POMPEII E. S. Martin 309
POMPEII <0. W. Carryl 310
CONTENTS xv
SORRENTO PAGE
SORRENTO Frederick Locker 312
SORRENTO T. W. Parsons 313
WRITTEN IN TASSO'S HOUSE Aubrey de Vere 315
SORRENTO W. W. Story 315
LOOKING BACK John Aldington Symonds 317
CAPRI
CAPBI Alfred Austin 320
THE AZURE GROTTO Charles D. Bell 321
AMALFI
AT AMALFI Lord Houghton 323
AMALFI H. W. Longfellow 324
AT AMALFI John Addington Symonds 328
P^STUM
P^ESTUM J. E. Reade 331
P^ESTUM C. P. Cranch 333
POSILIPO
THE VOYAGE AROUND POSILIPO.. Friederich Rueckert 335
VIRGIL'S TOMB R. C. Rogers 337
VIRGIL'S TOMB W. H. Gibson 338
POZZUOLI
THE AMPHITHEATRE AT POZZUOLI Henry Taylor 339
BAJA (BALE)
BALE James Thomson 340
RUINS OF CORNELIA'S HOUSE Aubrey de Vere 341
BALE Nicholas Mitchell 342
CUMA (CTJKdS)
CUM^ Virgil 343
THE SIBYL'S CAVE AT CUMA Aubrey de Vere 344
xvi CONTENTS
ISCHIA PAGE
INARIME H. W. Longfellow 345
REGGIO (RHEGIUM)
ON IBYCUS 343
REGGIO . . j, E . Reade 348
THE RIVER BUSENTO
THE GBAVE IN THE BUSENTO August von Platen 350
TARANTO (TARENTUM)
TARENTUM Virgil 352
BRINDISI (BRUNDISIUM)
BBUNDISIUM Lucan 354
ANCONA
POPPIES IN THE WHEAT Helen F. Jackson 356
FOSSOMBRONE
THE BELLS OF FOSSOMBBONE Clinton Scollard 357
FANO
THE GUARQIAN ANGEL Robert Browning 360
RIMINI
RIMINI ' Dante 363
RAVENNA
DANTE Giovanni Boccaccio 365
RAVENNA John Dryden 365
RAVENNA Lord Byron 366
RAVENNA Leigh Hunt 366
CONTENTS xvii
FERRARA PAGE
THE PRISON OF TASSO Lord Byron 368
TASSO'S DUNGEON Richard Chenevix Trench 370
To DUKE ALPHONSO, ASKING FOB LIBEBTY Tasso 371
ARQUA
PETBABCH'S TOMB Lord Byron 372
WBITTEN IN PETBARCH'S HOUSE Lord Houghton 373
PADUA
PADUA Virgil 375
PADUA Percy Bysshe Shelley 375
VENICE
VENICE Lord Byron 378
THE CABNIVAL Lord Byron 382
DUCAL PALACE Lord Byron 383
VENICE Percy Bysshe Shelley 385
AT VENICE A. H. Clough 388
THE PIAZZA OF ST. MABK AT MIDNIGHT Aldrich 389
SAINT CHRISTOPHEB William D. Howells 391
To VENICE AleTcsandri 392
THE GONDOLA Goethe 393
SUNRISE IN VENICE Joaquin Miller 394
A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S Robert Browning 396
VENICE Alfred de Musset 399
VENICE H. W. Longfellow 401
VENETIAN SUNBISE John Addington Symonds 402
VENICE John Addington Symonds 402
FBOM "LOVE IN ITALY" J. H. Ingham 403
IN THE SMALL CANALS. ..Jo Tin Addington Symonds 404
A MASQUE OF VENICE Emma Lazarus 405
THE DECAY OF VENICE S. W. Mitchell 408
VENETIAN NIGHT Arthur Symons 409
DAWN AT VENICE Martha G. Dickinson 410
VENICE Irving Browne 411
ON THE ZATTEBE Arthur Symons 415
xviii CONTENTS
PAGE
VENETA MABINA Arthur Symons 417
AT THE DOGANA Arthur Symons 418
ON THE LIDO A. H. Clough 418
LIDO Percy Bysshe Shelley 419
THE JEWS' CEMETERY John Addington Symonds 420
TOBCELLO
TORCELLO Helen Hunt 421
ASOLO
BROWNING AT ASOLO R. U. Johnson 422
FAREWELL TO ITALY
LINES ON LEAVING ITALY A. G. Oehlenschlager 424
FAREWELL TO ITALY W. 8. Landor 425
FAREWELL TO ITALY R. U. Johnson 426
THROUGH ITALY
WITH
THE POETS
ITALY
THE PRAISE OF ITALY
YET nor the Median groves, nor rivers rolled,
Ganges and Herraus, o'er their beds of gold,
Nor Ind, nor Bactra, nor the blissful land
Where incense spreads o'er rich Panchaia's sand,
Nor all that fancy paints in fabled lays,
O native Italy! transcend thy praise.
Though here no bulls beneath the enchanted yoke
With fiery nostrils o'er the furrow smoke,
No hydra teeth embattled harvest yield,
Spear and bright helmet bristling o'er the field ;
Yet golden corn each laughing valley fills,
The vintage reddens on a thousand hills,
Luxuriant olives spread from shore to shore,
And flocks unnumbered range the pastures o'er.
Hence the proud war-horse rushes on the foe,
Clitumnus ! hence thy herds, more white than snow,
And stately bull, that, of gigantic size,
Supreme of victims on the altar lies,
Bathed in thy sacred stream oft led the train,
When Rome in pomp of triumph decked the fane,
1
8 TKAGUGK ITALY WITH THE POETS
Here Spring perpetual leads the laughing hours,
And Winter wears a wreath of Summer flowers ;
The o'erloaded branch twice fills with fruits the
year,
And twice the teeming flocks their offspring rear.
Yet here no lion breeds, no tiger strays,
No tempting aconite the touch betrays,
No monstrous snake the uncoiling volume trails,
Or gathers, orb on orb, his iron scales.
But many a peopled city towers around,
And many a rocky cliff with castle crowned,
And many an antique wall, whose hoary brow
O'ershades the flood, that guards its base below.
Say, shall I add, enclosed on every side
What seas defend thee, and what lakes divide?
Thine, mighty Larius? or, with surging waves,
Where, fierce as ocean, vexed Benacus raves ?
Havens and ports, the Lucrine's added mole,
Seas, that enraged along their bulwark roll,
Where Julian waves reject the indignant tide,
And Tuscan billows down Avernus glide?
Here brass and silver ores rich veins expose,
And pregnant mines exhaustless gold enclose.
Blest in thy race, in battle unsubdued
The Marsian youth, and Sabine's hardy brood,
By generous toil the bold Ligurian's steeled,
And spear-armed Volsci that disdain to yield ;
Camilli, Marii, Decii, swell thy line,
And, thunderbolts of war, each Scipio, thine!
ITALY 3
Thou Cassar! chief, whose sword the East o'er-
powers,
And the tamed Indian drives from Roman towers.
All hail, Saturnian earth ! hail, loved of fame,
Land rich in fruits, and men of mighty name !
For thee I dare the sacred founts explore,
For thee the rules of ancient art restore,
Themes, once to glory raised, again rehearse,
And pour through Roman towns the Ascraean
verse. VIRGIL.
Tr. William Sotheby. ,
TO ITALY
O ITALY, my country ! I behold
Thy columns, and thine arches, and thy walls,
And the proud statues of our ancestors ;
The laurel and the mail with which our sires
Were clad, these I behold not, nor their fame.
Why thus unarmed, with naked breast and brow?
What means that livid paleness, those deep
wounds ?
To heaven and earth I raise my voice, and ask
What hand hath brought thee to this low estate,
Who, worse than all, hath loaded thee with chains,
So that, unveiled and with dishevelled hair,
Thou sittest on the ground disconsolate,
*
4 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Hiding thy weeping face between thy knees ?
Ay, weep, Italia ! thou hast cause to weep !
Degraded and forlorn. Yes, were thine eyes
Two living fountains, never could thy tears
Equal thy desolation and thy shame !
Fallen ! ruined ! lost ! who writes or speaks of
thee,
But, calling unto mind thine ancient fame,
Exclaims, "Once she was mighty! Is this she?"
Where is thy vaunted strength, thy high resolve?
Who from thy belt hath torn the warrior sword?
How hast thou fallen from thy pride of place
To this abyss of misery? Are there none
To combat for thee, to defend thy cause?
To arms! Alone I'll fight and fall for thee!
Content if my best blood strike forth one spark
To fire the bosoms of my countrymen.
Where are thy sons? I hear the clang of arms,
The din of voices, and the bugle-note ;
Sure they are fighting for a noble cause !
Yes, one faint hope remains I see I see
The fluttering of banners in the breeze ;
I hear the tramp of horses and of men,
The roar of cannon, and, like glittering lamps
Amid the darkening gloom, the flash of swords.
Is there no comfort? And who combat there
In that Italian camp? Alas, ye gods,
Italian brands fight for a foreign lord !
O, miserable those whose blood is shed
ITALY
Not for their native land, for wife or child,
But for a stranger lord who cannot say
With dying breath, "My country ! I restore
The life thou givest, and gladly die for thee !"
GIACOMO LEOPABDI.
Tr. Ancn.
MIGNON
DOST know the land of lemon-flowers,
Of dusky gold-flecked orange bowers ?
The breath of the azure sky scarce heaves
The myrtle and high laurel leaves.
Dost know it well?
Oh there, 'tis there
Together, dear one, we must fare.
Dost know the house? the gleaming walls
The pillared roof, the brilliant halls?
Grave statues stand and look at me :
"What have they done, poor child, to thee?"
Dost know it well?
Oh there, 'tis there
My dear protector, we must fare.
Dost know the peak and its path in the gray?
The mule in the mist is seeking his way,
The dragon-folk dwell in the ancient lair,
6 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
The stream crashes over the boulder there.
Dost know it well?
Oh there, 'tis there
Our path leads ; Father, let us fare !
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE.
Tr. Robert Haven Schauffler.
ITALY
(From "A Litany of Nations. 99 )
I AM she that was the light of thee enkindled
When Greece grew dim ;
She whose life grew up with man's free life, and
dwindled
With wane of him.
She that once by sword and once by word imperial
Struck bright thy gloom;
And a third time, casting off these years funereal,
Shall burst thy tomb.
By that bond 'twixt thee and me whereat af-
frighted
Thy tyrants fear us;
By that hope and this remembrance reunited;
(Cho.) O mother, hear us.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE,
ITALY
"ITALIA, 10 TI SALUTO!"
To come back from the sweet South, to the North
To where I was born, bred, look to die ;
Come back to do my day's work in its day,
Play out my play
Amen, amen, say I.
To see no more the country half my own,
Nor hear the half familiar speech,
Amen I say ; I turn to that bleak North
Whence I came forth
The South lies out of reach.
But when our swallows fly back to the South,
To the sweet South, to the sweet South,
The tears may come again into my eyes
On the old wise,
And the sweet name to my mouth.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.
THE DAISY
O LOVE, what hours were thine and mine
In lands of palm and southern pine,
In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.
8 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
What Roman strength Turbia showed
In ruin, by the mountain road ;
How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco, basking, glowed.
How richly down the rocky dell
The torrent vineyard streaming fell
To meet the sun and sunny waters,
That only heaved with a summer swell.
What slender campanili grew
By bays, the peacock's neck in hue ;
Where, here and there, on sandy beaches
A milky-belled amaryllis blew.
How young Columbus seemed to rove,
Yet present in his natal grove,
Now watching high on mountain cornice,
And steering, now, from a purple cove,
Now pacing mute by ocean's rim
Till, in a narrow street and dim,
I stayed the wheels at Cogoletto,
And drank, and loyally drank to him, .
Nor knew we well what pleased us most,
Not the dipt palm of which they boast ;
But distant colour, happy hamlet,
A mouldered citadel on the coast,
ITALY 9
Or tower, or high hill-convent, seen
A light amid its olives green;
Or olive-hoary cape in ocean ;
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine,
Where oleanders flushed the bed
Of silent torrents, gravel-spread;
And, crossing, oft we saw the glisten .
Of ice, far up on a mountain head.
We loved that hall, though white and cold,
Those niched shapes of noble mould,
A princely people's awful princes,
The grave, severe Genovese of old.
At Florence, too, what golden hours
In those long galleries were ours ;
What drives about the fresh Cascine,
Or walks in Boboli's ducal bowers.
In bright vignettes, and each complete,
Of tower or duomo, sunny-sweet,
Or palace, how the city glittered,
Through cypress avenues, at our feet.
But when we crost the Lombard plain
Remember what a plague of rain ;
Of rain at Reggio, rain at Parma ;
At Lodi, rain, Piacenza, rain.
10 THBOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And stern and sad (so rare the smiles
Of sunlight) looked the Lombard piles ;
Porch-pillars on the lion resting,
And sombre, old, colonnaded aisles.
Milan, O the chanting quires,
The giant windows' blazoned fires,
The height, the space, the gloom, the glory!
A mount of marble, a hundred spires !
1 climbed the roofs at break of day ;
Sun-smitten Alps before me lay.
I stood among the silent statues,
And statued pinnacles, mute as they.
How faintly flushed, how phantom-fair,
Was Monte Rosa hanging there
A thousand shadowy-pencilled valleys
And snowy dells in a golden air.
Remember how we came at last
TO Como ; shower and storm and blast
Had blown the lake beyond his limit,
And all was flooded; and how we past
From Como, when the light was gray,
And in my head, for half the day,
The rich Virgilian rustic measure
Of Lari Maxume, all the way
ITALY 11
Like ballad-burden music kept,
As on the L&riano crept
To that fair port below the castle
Of Queen Theodolind, where we slept ;
Or hardly slept, but watched awake
A cypress in the moonlight shake,
The moonlight touching o'er a terrace
One tall Agave above the lake.
What more? we took our last adieu,
And up the snowy Spliigen drew,
But ere we reached the highest summit
I plucked a daisy, I gave it you.
It told of England then to me,
And now it tells of Italy.
O love, we two shall go no longer
To lands of summer across the sea ;
So dear a life your arms enfold
Whose crying is a cry for gold:
Yet here to-night in this dark city,
When ill and weary, alone and cold,
I found, tho' crush'd to hard and dry,
This nursling of another sky
Still in the little book you lent me,
And where you tenderly laid it by :
IS THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And I forgot the clouded Forth,
The gloom that saddens heaven and earth,
The bitter east, the misty summer
And grey metropolis of the North.
Perchance to lull the throbs of pain,
Perchance to charm a vacant brain,
Perchance to dream you still beside me,
My fancy fled to the South again.
ALFRED TENNYSON.
ITALY
OUR Italy's
The darling of the earth, the treasury, piled
With reveries of gentle ladies, flung
Aside, like ravelled silk, from life's worn stuff,
With coins of scholars' fancy, which, being
rung
On workday counter, still sound silver-proof,
In short, with all the dreams of dreamers young,
Before their heads have time for slipping off
Hope's pillow to the ground. How oft, indeed,
We all have sent our souls out from the north,
On bare white feet which would not print nor
bleed,
To climb the Alpine passes and look forth,
Where the low murmuring Lombard rivers lead
ITALY 13
Their bee-like way to gardens almost worth
The sight which thou and I see afterward
From Tuscan Bellosguardo, wide awake,
When standing on the actual, blessed sward
Where Galileo stood at nights to take
The vision of the stars, we find it hard,
Gazing upon the earth and heaven, to make
A choice of beauty.
ELIZABETH BAEHETT BROWNING.
TO ITALY
Stanzas from the "Italian Rhapsody."
ABSENCE from thee is such as men endure
Between the glad betrothal and the bride;
Or like the years that Youth, intense and sure,
From his ambition to his goal must bide.
And if no more I may
Mount to Fiesole . . .
Oh, then were Memory meant for those to whom
is Hope denied.
Show me a lover who hath drunk by night
Thy beauty-potion, as the grape the dew:
'T were little wonder he were poet too,
With wine of song in unexpected might,
14 THKOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
While moonlit cloister calls
With plashy fountain-falls,
Or darkened Arno moves to music with its mir-
rored light.
Who can withstand thee? What distress or care
But yields to Naples, or that long day-dream
We know as Venice, where alone more fair
Noon is than night ; where every lapping stream
Woos with a soft caress
Our new-world weariness,
And every ripple smiles with joy at sight of scene
so rare.
The mystery of thy charm ah, who hath
guessed?
'T were ne'er divined by day or shown in sleep ;
Yet sometimes Music, floating from her steep,
Holds to our lips a chalice brimmed and blest :
Then know we that thou art
Of the Ideal part
Of Man's one thirst that is not quenched, drink
he howe'er so deep.
Thou human-hearted land, whose revels hold
Man in communion with the antique days,
And summon him from prosy greed to ways
Where Youth is beckoning to the Age of Gold ;
ITALY 15
How thou dost hold him near
And whisper in his ear
Of the lost Paradise that lies beyond the alluring
haze!
In tears I tossed my coin from Trevi's edge,
A coin unsordid as a bond of love,
And, with the instinct of the homing dove,
I gave to Rome my rendezvous and pledge.
And when imperious Death
Has quenched my flame of breath,
Oh, let me join the faithful shades that throng
that fount above.
ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON.
ITALIA
ITALIA! thou art fallen, though with sheen
Of battle-spears thy clamorous armies stride
From the north Alps to the Sicilian tide !
Ay ! fallen, though the nations hail thee Queen
Because rich gold in every town is seen,
And on thy sapphire lake in tossing pride
Of wind-filled vans thy myriad galleys ride
Beneath one flag of red and white and green.
O Fair and Strong! O Strong and Fair in
vain!
16 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Look southward where Rome's desecrated town
Lies mourning for her God-anointed King !
Look heavenward! shall God allow this thing?
Nay; but some flame-girt Raphael shall come
down,
And smite the Spoiler with the sword of pain.
OSCAE WILDE.
A SONG OF ITALY
ITALIA ! by the passion of the pain
That bent and rent thy chain;
Italia ; by the breaking of the bands,
The shaking of the lands ;
Beloved, O men's mother, O men's queen,
Arise, appear, be seen!
Arise, array thyself in manifold
Queen's raiment of wrought gold ;
With girdles of green freedom, and with red
Roses, and white snow shed
Above the flush and f rondage of the hills
That all thy deep dawn fills
That all thy clear night veils and warms with
wings
Spread till the morning sings ;
The rose of resurrection, and the bright
Breast lavish of the light,
ITALY 17
The lady lily like the snowy sky
Ere the stars wholly die;
As red as blood, and whiter than a wave,
Flowers grown as from thy grave,
From the green fruitful grass in Maytime hot,
Thy grave, where thou art not.
Gather the grass and weave, in sacred sign
Of the ancient earth divine,
The holy heart of things, the seed of birth,
The mystical warm earth.
O thou her flower of flowers, with treble braid
Be thy sweet head arrayed,
In witness of her mighty motherhood
Who bore thee and found thee good,
Her fairest-born of children, on whose head
Her green and white and red
Are hope and light and life, inviolate
Of any latter fate.
Fly, O our flag, through deep Italian air,
Above the flags that were,
The dusty shreds of shameful battle-flags
Trampled and rent in rags,
As withering woods in autumn's bitterest breath
Yellow, and black as death ;
Black as crushed worms that sicken in the sense,
And yellow as pestilence.
Fly, green as summer and red as dawn and white
As the live heart of light,
18 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
The blind bright womb of color unborn, that
brings
Forth all fair forms of things,
As freedom all fair forms of nations dyed
In divers-coloured pride.
Fly fleet as wind on every wind that blows
Between her seas and snows,
From Alpine white, from Tuscan green, and where
Vesuvius reddens air.
Fly ! and let all men see it, and all kings wail,
And priests wax faint and pale,
And the cold hordes that moan in misty places
And the funereal races
And the sick serfs of lands that wait and wane
See thee and hate thee in vain.
In the clear laughter of all winds and waves,
In the blown grass of graves,
In the long sound of fluctuant boughs of trees,
In the broad breath of seas,
Bid the sound of thy flying folds be heard;
And as a spoken word
Full of that fair god and that merciless
Who rends the Pythoness,
So be the sound and so the fire that saith
She feels her ancient breath
And the old blood move in her immortal veins.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
ITALY 19
"DE GUSTIBUS "
I
YOUR ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
(If our loves remain)
In an English lane,
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say,
The happier they!
Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
With the beanflower's boon,
And the blackbird's tune,
And May, and June !
II
What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurl'd,
In a gash of the wind-griev'd Apennine.
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,
And come again to the land of lands)
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the bak'd cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree 't is a cypress stands,
20 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spik'd, ripe fruit o'ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands
To the water's edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, for ever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there's news to-day the king
Was shot at, touch'd in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:
She hopes they have not caught the felons.
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary's saying serves for me
(When fortune's malice
Lost her Calais)
Open my heart and you will see
Grav'd inside of it, "Italy."
Such lovers old are I and she:
So it always was, so shall ever be.
ROBERT BROWNING.
VERONA
VERONA
CKOSS Adria's gulf, and land where softly glide
A stream's crisp waves, to join blue Ocean's tide;
Still westward hold thy way, till Alps look down
On old Verona's walled and classic town.
Fair is the prospect ; palace, tower, and spire,
And blossomed grove, the eye might well admire ;
Heaven-piercing mountains capped with endless
snow,
Where winter reigns, and frowns on earth below ;
Old castles crowning many a craggy steep,
From which in silver sounding torrents leap:
Southward the plain where Summer builds her
bowers,
And floats on downy gales the soul of flowers ;
Where orange-blossoms glad the honeyed bee,
And vines in festoons wave from tree to tree ;
While, like a streak of sky from heaven let fall,
The deep blue river, glittering, winds through all ;
The woods that whisper to the zephyr's kiss,
Where nymphs might taste again Arcadian bliss ;
The sun-bright hills that bound the distant view,
And melt like mists in skies of tenderest blue
21
22 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
All charm the ravished sense, and dull is he
Who, cold, unmoved, such glorious scene can see.
Here did the famed Catullus rove and dream,
And godlike Pliny drink of Wisdom's stream;
Wronged by his friends, and exiled by his foes,
Amid these vales did Dante breathe his woes,
Raise demons up, call seraphs from the sky,
And frame the dazzling verse that ne'er shall die.
Here, too, hath Fiction weaved her loveliest spell,
Visions of beauty float o'er crag and dell ;
But chief we seem to hear at evening hour
The sigh of Juliet in her starlit bower,
Follow her form slow gliding through the gloom,
And drop a tear above her mouldered tomb.
Sweet are these thoughts, and in such favoured
scene
Methinks life's stormiest skies might grow serene,
Care smooth her brow, the troubled heart find rest,
And, spite of crime and passion, man be blest.
But to our theme: The pilgrim comes to trace
Verona's ruins, not bright Nature's face ;
Be still, chase lightsome fancies, ere thou dare
Approach yon pile, so grand yet softly fair ;
The mighty circle, breathing beauty, seems
The work of genii in immortal dreams.
So firm the mass, it looks as built to vie
With Alp's eternal ramparts towering nigh.
VERONA 23
Its graceful strength each lofty portal keeps,
Unbroken round the first great cincture sweeps ;
The marble benches, tier on tier, ascend,
The winding galleries seem to know no end.
Glistening and pure, the summer sunbeams fall,
Softening each sculptured arch and rugged wall.
We tread the arena ; blood no longer flows,
But in the sand the pale-eyed violet blows,
While ivy, covering many a bench, is seen,
Staining its white with lines of liveliest green,
Age-honouring plant ! that weds not buildings gay,
With love, still faithful, clinging to decay.
NICHOLAS MITCHELL.
TO VERONA
VERONA ! thy tall gardens stand erect
Beckoning me upward. Let me rest awhile
Where the birds whistle hidden in the boughs,
Or fly away when idlers take their place,
Mated as well, concealed as willingly;
Idlers whose nest must not swing there, but rise
Beneath a gleamy canopy of gold,
Amid the flight of Cupids, and the smiles
Of Venus ever radiant o'er their couch.
Here would I stay, here wander, slumber here,
Nor pass into that theatre below
Crowded with their faint memories, shades of joy.
24 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
But ancient song arouses me ; I hear
Coelius and Anfilena ; I behold
Lesbia, and Lesbia's linnet at her lip
Pecking the fruit that ripens and swells out
For him whose song the Graces loved the most,
Whatever land, east, west, they visited.
Even he must not detain me : one there is
Greater than he, of broader wing, or swoop
Sublimer. Open now that humid arch
Where Juliet sleeps the quiet sleep of death,
And Romeo sinks aside her.
Fare ye well,
Lovers ! Ye have not loved in vain : the hearts
Of millions throb around ye. This lone tomb
One greater than yon walls have ever seen,
Greater than Mantua's prophet eye foresaw
In her own child or Rome's hath hallowed ;
And the last sod or stone a pilgrim knee
Shall press (Love swears it, and swears true) is
here.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
AT VERONA
HOAV STEEP the stairs within King's houses are
For exile-wearied feet as mine to tread,
And O how salt and bitter is the bread
Which falls from this Hound's table, better far
VERONA 25
That I had died in the red ways of war,
Or that the gate of Florence bare my head,
Than to live thus, by all things comraded
Which seek the essence of my soul to mar.
"Curse God and die: what better hope than this?
He hath forgotten thee in all the bliss
Of his gold city, and eternal day"
Nay peace : behind my prison's blinded bars
I do possess what none can take away,
My love, and all the glory of the stars.
OSCAR WILDE.
BEFORE THE OLD CASTLE OF VERONA
GREEN Adige, 'twas thus in rapid course
And powerful, that thou didst murmur 'neath
The Roman bridges sparkling from thy stream
Thine ever-running song unto the sun,
When Odoacer, giving way before
The onrush of Theodoric, fell back,
And midst the bloody wrack about them passed
Into this fair Verona blonde and straight
Barbarian women in their chariots, singing
Songs unto Odin; while the Italian folk
Gathered about their Bishop and put forth
To meet the Goths the supplicating Cross.
26 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Thus from the mountains rigid with their snows,
In all the placid winter's silver gladness
To-day thou still, O tireless fugitive,
Dost murmuring pass upon thy way, beneath
The Scaligers' old battlemented bridge,
Betwixt time-blackened piles and squalid trees,
To far-off hills serene, and to the towers
Whence weep the mourning banners for the day,
Returning now, which saw the death of him
Whom a free Italy first chose her king.
Still, Adige, thou singest as of yore
Thine ever-running song unto the sun.
I, too, fair river, sing, and this my song
Would put the centuries into little verse ;
And palpitating to each thought, my heart
Follows the stanza's upward-quivering flight.
But with the years, my verse will dull and fade;
Thou, Adige, the eternal poet art,
Who still when of these hills the turret crown
Is shattered into fragments, and the snake
Sits hissing in the sunlight where now stands
The great basilica, St. Zeno's fane
Still in the desert solitudes wilt voice
The sleepless tedium of the infinite.
GIOSUE CARDUCCI.
Tr. M. W. Arms.
MANTUA
MANTUA
ABOVE in beauteous Italy lies a lake
At the Alp's foot that shuts in Germany
Over Tyrol, and has the name Benaco.
By a thousand springs, I think, and more, is
bathed,
'Twixt Garda and Val Camonica, Pennine,
With water that grows stagnant in that lake.
Midway a place is where the Trentine Pastor,
And he of Brescia, and the Veronese
Might give his blessing, if he passed that way.
Sitteth Peschiera, fortress fair and strong,
To front the Brescians and the Bergamasks,
Where round about the bank descendeth lowest.
There of necessity must fall whatever
In bosom of Benaco cannot stay,
And grows a river down through verdant pas-
tures.
Soon as the water doth begin to run,
No more Benaco is it called, but Mincio,
Far as Governo, where it falls in Po.
Not far it runs before it finds a plain
In which it spreads itself, and makes it marshy,
And oft 't is wont in summer to be sickly.
27
28 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Passing that way the virgin pitiless
Land in the middle of the fen descried,
Untilled and naked of inhabitants ;
There to escape all human intercourse
She with her servants stayed, her arts to prac-
tice
And lived, and left her empty body there.
The men, thereafter, who were scattered round,
Collected in that place, which was made strong
By the lagoon it had on every side;
They built their city over those dead bones,
And, after her who first the place selected,
Mantua named it, without other omen.
Its people once within more crowded were,
Ere the stupidity of Casalodi
From Pinamonte had received deceit.
Therefore I caution thee, if e'er thou hearest
Originate my city otherwise,
No falsehood may the verity defraud.
DANTE ALIGHIERI.
Tr. H. W. Longfellow.
MANTUA 29
IN THE MEADOWS AT MANTUA
BUT to have lain upon the grass
One perfect day, one perfect hour,
Beholding all things mortal pass
Into the quiet of green grass;
But to have lain and loved the sun,
Under the shadow of the trees,
To have been found in unison,
One, only, with the blessed sun !
Ah ! in these flaring London nights,
Where midnight withers into morn,
How quiet a rebuke it writes
Across the sky of London nights 1
Upon the grass at Mantua
These London nights were all forgot.
They wake for me again: but ah,
The meadow-grass at Mantua !
AETHUR SYMONS.
LAKE GARDA
SIRMIO
SWEET Sirmio ! thou, the very eye
Of all peninsulas and isles,
That in our lakes of silver lie,
Or sleep, enwreathed by Neptune's smileSj
How gladly back to thee I fly!
Still doubting, asking, can it be
That I have left Bithynia's sky,
And gaze in safety upon thee?
O, what is happier than to find
Our hearts at ease, our perils past ;
When, anxious long, the lightened mind
Lays down its load of care at last ;
When, tired with toil o'er land and deep,
Again we tread the welcome floor
Of our own home, and sink to sleep
On the long-wished-for bed once more.
This, this it is, that pays alone
The ills of all life's former track.
Shine out, my beautiful, my own
Sweet Sirmio ! greet thy master back.
80
LAKE GARDA 31
And thou, fair lake, whose water quaffs
The light of heaven like Lydia's sea,
Rejoice, rejoice, let all that laughs
Abroad, at home, laugh out for me.
CATULLUS.
Tr. Thomas Moore.
'PRATER AVE ATQUE VALE'
Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione
row!
So they row'd, and there we landed C O venusta
Sirmio !'
There to me thro' all the groves of olive in the
summer glow,
There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple
flowers grow,
Came that 6 Ave atque Vale' of the Poet's hopeless
woe,
Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years
ago,
'Prater Ave atque Vale' as we wander'd to and
fro
Gazing at the Lydian-laughter of the Garda Lake
below
Sweet Catullus's all-but-island, olive-silvery Sir-
mio ! ALFRED TENNYSON.
BRESCIA
THE PATRIOT
IT was roses, roses, all the way,
With myrtle mixed in my path like mad.
The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
The church-spires flamed, such flags they had,
A year ago on this very day !
The air broke into a mist with bells,
The old walls rocked with the crowds and cries.
Had I said, "Good folks, mere noise repels,
But give me your sun from yonder skies !"
They had answered, "And afterward, what else?"
Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun,
To give it my loving friends to keep.
Naught man could do have I left undone,
And you see my harvest, what I reap
This very day, now a year is run.
There's nobody on the house-tops now,
Just a palsied few at the windows set,
For the best of the sight is, all allow,
At the Shambles' Gate, or, better yet,
By the very scaffold's foot, I trow.
BRESCIA 33
I go in the rain, and, more than needs,
A rope cuts both my wrists behind,
And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,
For they fling, whoever has a mind,
Stones at me for my year's misdeeds.
Thus I entered Brescia, and thus I go!
In such triumphs people have dropped down
dead.
"Thou, paid by the world, what dost thou owe
Me?" God might have question; but now in-
stead
'Tis God shall requite! I am safer so.
ROBERT BROWNING.
MILAN
MILAN
MILAN with plenty and with wealth o'erflows,
And numerous streets and cleanly dwellings shows :
The people, blessed with Nature's happy force,
Are eloquent and cheerful in discourse ;
A circus and a theatre invites
The unruly mob to races and to fights.
Moneta consecrated buildings grace,
And the whole town redoubled walls embrace ;
Here spacious baths and palaces are seen,
And intermingled temples rise between ;
Here circling colonnades the ground enclose,
And here the marble statues breathe in rows :
Profusely graced the happy town appears,
Nor Rome itself her beauteous neighbor fears.
AUSONIUS.
Tr. Joseph Addison.
THE LAST SUPPER
By Leonardo da Vinci, in the refectory of the
Convent of Maria delta Grazia, Milan.
THOUGH searching damps and many an envious
flaw
84
MILAN 35
Have marred this work, the calm, ethereal grace,
The love, deep-seated in the Saviour's face,
The mercy, goodness, have not failed to awe
The elements ; as they do melt and thaw
The heart of the beholder, and erase
(At least for one rapt moment) every trace
Of disobedience to the primal law.
The annunciation of the dreadful truth
Made to the Twelve survives : lip, forehead, cheek,
And hand reposing on the board in ruth
Of what it utters, while the unguilty seek
Unquestionable meanings, still bespeak
A labour worthy of eternal youth!
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
LEONARDO'S "LAST SUPPER" AT MILAN
COME ! if thy heart be pure, thy spirits calm.
If thou hast no harsh feelings, or but those
Which self-reproach inflicts, ah no, bestows,
Her wounds, here probed, find here their gentlest
balm.
O the sweet sadness of that lifted palm !
The dreadful deed to come his lips disclose;
Yet love and awe, not wrath, that countenance
shows,
As though they sang even now that ritual psalm
36 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Which closed the feast piacular. Time hath done
His work on this fair picture ; but that face
His outrage awes. Stranger ! the mist of years
Between thee hung and half its heavenly grace,
Hangs there, a fitting veil; nor that alone,
Gaze on it also through a veil of tears !
AUBREY DE VERB.
LINES WRITTEN ON THE ROOF OF
MILAN CATHEDRAL
"A mount of marble, a hundred spires."
THE long, long night of utter loneliness,
Of conflict, pain, defeat, and sore distress,
Hath vanished; and I stand as one whose life
Wages with death a scarcely winning strife,
Here on this mount of marble. Like a sea
Waveless and blue, the sky's transparency
Bathes spire and statue. Was it man or God
Who built those domes, whereon the feet have trod
Of eve and night and morn with rose and gold
And silver and strange symbols manifold
Of shadow? Fabric not of stone but mist
Or pearl or cloud beneath heaven's amethyst
Glitters the marvel : cloud congealed to shine
Through centuries with lustre crystalline ;
Pearl spiked and fretted like an Orient shell ;
Mist on the frozen fern-wreaths of a well.
MILAN 37
Not God's but man's work this : God's yonder fane,
Reared on the distant limit of the plain.
Around me rise the grey-green olive trees,
From azure into azure, to blue sky
Shooting from vapours blue that folded lie
Round valley-basements, robed in royal snow,
Wheref rom life-giving waters leaping flow,
Aerial Monte Rosa! God and man
Confront each other, with this narrow span
Of plain to part them, try what each can do
To make applauding Seraphs from the blue
Lean marvel-smitten, or alight with song
Upon the glittering peaks, or clustering throng
The spacious pathways. God on man's work here
Hath set His signature and symbol clear;
Man's soul that thinks and feels, to God's work
there
Gives life, which else were cold and dumb and bare.
God is man's soul ; man's soul a spark of God :
By God in man the dull terrestrial clod
Becomes a thing of beauty ; thinking man
Through God made manifest, outrival can
His handiwork of nature. Do we dream
Mingling reality with things that seem?
Or is it true that God and man appear
One soul in sentient art self-conscious here,
One soul o'er senseless nature stair by stair
Raised to create by comprehending there?
JOHN ADDJNGTON SYMONDS,
38 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
MILAN CATHEDRAL,
O PEEELESS church of old Milan,
How brightly thou com'st back to me,
With all thy minarets and towers,
And sculptured marbles fair to see !
With all thy airy pinnacles
So white against the cloudless blue ;
With all thy richly storied panes,
And mellowed sunlight streaming through.
O lovely church of loved Milan,
Can sadness with thy brightness blend?
Lo ! moving down that high-arched aisle,
Those mourners for an absent friend.
In every hand a lighted torch,
Above the dead a sable pall,
On every face a look that tells,
She was the best beloved of all.
And low and faint the funeral chant
Subdued the pealing organ's tone,
As past the altars of her faith
They slow and silent bear her on.
O holy church of proud Milan,
A simpler tomb enshrines for me
The one I loved, who never stood
As now I stand to gaze on thee.
MILAN 39
Yet all I see perchance she sees,
And chides not the unbidden tear,
That flows to think how vain the wish,
My life's companion, thou wert here!
O solemn church of gay Milan
I owe that pensive hour to thee ;
And oft may sacred sadness dwell
Within my soul to temper glee!
Those airy pinnaces that shine
So white against the dark blue sky,
Ascend from tranquil vaults where bones
Which wait the resurrection lie !
HENRY GLASSFORD BELL.
ON MILAN CATHEDRAL
SHROUDED in grey
The city lay,
And the fog and the gargoyles were friends that
day,
When high in the tower I took my stand
And scanned
The dull panorama for signs of fabled Switzer-
land.
40 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Vapor-lashes veiled the sun god's glance,
Dark as doubt and dense as ignorance.
But suddenly
Apollo shook his damp curls dewy-free.
And straight there glowed, as glows the morn,
Monte Rosa and Matterhorn,
And lo haze curtains of saffron and rose
From Bernard and Viso and Blanc were torn.
And I thought how the mists of my morning had
melted away,
When maturity looked with the eyes of the day;
And I pondered what ultimate ranges the noon
would disclose
That still remain shrouded in grey.
ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER.
LAKE COMO
LAKE OF COMO
MORE pleased, my foot the hidden margin roves
Of Como, bosomed deep in chestnut groves.
No meadows thrown between, the giddy steeps
Tower, bare or sylvan, from the narrow deeps.
To towns, whose shades of no rude noise complain,
From ringing team apart and grating wain,
To flat-roofed towns, that touch the water's
bound,
Or lurk in woody sunless glens profound,
Or, from the bending rocks, obtrusive cling,
And o'er the whitened wave their shadows fling,
The pathway leads, as round the steeps it twines ;
And silence loves its purple roof of vines.
The loitering traveller hence, at evening, sees
From rock-hewn steps the sail between the trees ;
Or marks, mid opening cliffs, fair dark-eyed maids
Tend the small harvest of their garden glades ;
Or stops the solemn mountain-shades to view
Stretch o'er the pictured mirror broad and blue,
And track the yellow lights from steep to steep,
As up the opposing hills they slowly creep.
41
4 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Aloft, here, half a village shines, arrayed
In golden light; half hides itself in shade:
While, from amid the darkened roofs, the spire,
Restlessly flashing, seems to mount like fire:
There, all unshaded, blazing forests throw
Rich golden verdure on the lake below.
Slow glides the sail along the illumined shore,
And steals into the shade the lazy oar ;
Soft bosoms breathe around contagious sighs,
And amorous music on the water dies.
How blest, delicious scene ! the eye that greets
Thy open beauties or thy lone retreats,
Beholds the unwearied sweep of wood that scales
Thy cliffs ; the endless waters of thy vales ;
Thy lowly cots that sprinkle all the shore,
Each with its household boat beside the door ;
Thy torrent shooting from the clear-blue sky ;
Thy towns, that cleave, like swallows' nests, on
high;
That glimmer hoar in eve's last light, descried
Dim from the twilight water's shaggy side,
Whence lutes and voices down the enchanted woods
Steal, and compose the oar-forgotten floods ;
Thy lake, that, streaked or dappled, blue or gray,
Mid smoking woods gleams hid from morning's
ray
Slow-travelling down the western hills, to enfold
Its green-tinged margin in a blaze of gold;
LAKE COMO 43
Thy glittering steeples, whence the matin bell
Calls forth the woodman from his desert cell,
And quickens the blithe sound of oars that pass
Along the steaming lake, to early mass.
But now farewell to each and all, adieu
To every charm, and last and chief to you,
Ye lovely maidens that in noontide shade
Rest near your little plots of wheaten glade ;
To all that binds the soul in powerless trance,
Lip-dewing song, and ringlet-tossing dance;
Where sparkling eyes and breaking smiles illume
The sylvan cabin's lute-enlivened gloom.
Alas! the very murmur of the streams
Breathes o'er the failing soul voluptuous dreams,
While slavery, forcing the sunk mind to dwell
On joys that might disgrace the captive's cell,
Her shameless timbrel shakes on Como's marge,
And lures from bay to bay the vocal barge.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
LAKE COMO
AROUND me rise the gray-green olive trees,
The palm, the pine, the lemon and the fig;
A spray of honeysuckle scents the breeze
A-dangle from a slim acacia twig.
44 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Bronze, green with moss, this Triton-fountain
plays,
While red and orange fishes swim below ;
Like blushing nymphs a-peep through misty
sprays,
I see the scarlet-robed geraniums glow.
Here gowned in pink, with copper-tinted cheek,
An ardent rose swings from a trailing vine,
And hanging yellow with a crimson streak,
A ripe, round peach is waiting to be mine.
Canary-coloured asters blaze and burn,
Carnations in flame-coloured garbs are gowned ;
The clustered grapes to gold and purple turn,
With honeyed nectars swelling ripe and round.
Along this wall the blue wistaria blows,
The green magnolia lifts her milk-white flowers ;
The poppy like a Cleopatra glows,
And trumpet-blossoms droop in scarlet showers.
Queen over all, the oleander blooms,
And scatters pink-white snows across the lawn ;
Her splendour glimmers through the verdant
glooms
As rosy and as radiant as the dawn.
LAKE COMO 45
Beyond, the lake is darkest, deepest green;
Its emerald surges toss with tiny boats ;
Far-reaching over all the peaceful scene,
The shadow of a mighty mountain floats.
The terraced villas fleck the mountain side
With walls of buff and brown and ochre-red ;
And over all the prospect far and wide
A saffron tower uplifts its slender head.
A monastery crowns a hazy height;
Luxuriant creepers cover half the stones ;
Above the creamy walls, in amber light,
The cypress rears its trim-sharp-pointed cones.
Far-off, in deepest, softest, dimmest blue,
The faint, faint mountains melt in mellow skies,
As dreamy-sweet as one whose soul is true,
When saying that she loves me with her eyes.
As night comes on, a cloud all rosy-red
Conceals the splendour of the silvery moon ;
Then sunset's crocus petals all are shed,
And like a golden melon hangs the moon.
Across the lake, aglitter light on light,
Strung like a necklace, little cities gleam,
While harps and bugles through the fragrant
night,
Lure sleepless lovers to a land of dream.
46 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Yet beauty such as this must end at last,
And so a tempest gathers in its might.
The thunders roll, trees shiver in the blast,
And angry lightnings pierce the shuddering
night.
Sheet after sheet, the furious torrents fall,
Flame after flame, the swords of heaven flash.
The locust boughs are snapped against the wall,
The fisher-boats against the beaches dash.
Night, like a passion-mad Elizabeth,
Smites day, her Essex loved in bygone years,
Then, horror-stricken at her darling's death,
Pours on his grave a torrent of her tears.
WALTER MALONE.
CADENABBIA
No SOUND of wheels or hoof -beat breaks
The silence of the summer day,
As by the loveliest of all lakes
I while the idle hours away.
I pace the leafy colonnade
Where level branches of the plane
Above me weave a roof of shade
Impervious to the sun and rain.
LAKE COMO 47
At times a sudden rush of air
Flutters the lazy leaves o'erhead,
And gleams of sunshine toss and flare
Like torches down the path I tread.
By Somariva's garden gate
I make the marble stairs my seat,
And hear the water, as I wait,
Lapping the steps beneath my feet.
The undulation sinks and swells
Along the stony parapets,
And far away the floating bells
Tinkle upon the fisher's nets.
Silent and slow, by tower and town
The freighted barges come and go,
By town and tower submerged below.
Their pendent shadows gliding down
The hills sweep upward from the shore
With villas scattered one by one
Upon their wooded spurs, and lower
Bellaggio blazing in the sun.
And dimly seen, a tangled mass
Of walls and woods, of light and shade,
Stands beckoning up the Stelvio Pass
Varenna with its white cascade.
48 THBOUSH ITALY WITH THE POETS
I ask myself, Is this a dream?
Will it all vanish into air?
Is there a land of such supreme
And perfect beauty anywhere?
Sweet vision! Do not fade away;
Linger until my heart shall take
Into itself the summer day,
And all the beauty of the lake.
Linger until upon my brain
Is stamped an image of the scene,
Then fade into the air again,
And be as if thou hadst not been.
HENEY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
LAKE VARESE
LAGO VARESE
I STOOD beside Varese's Lake,
Mid that redundant growth
Of vines and maize and bower and brake
Which Nature, kind to sloth,
And scarce solicited by human toil,
Pours from the riches of the teeming soil.
A mossy softness distance lent
To each divergent hill,
One crept away looking back as it went,
The rest lay round and still ;
The westering sun not dazzling now, though bright
Shed o'er the mellow land a molten light.
And, sauntering up a circling cove,
I found upon the strand
A shallop, and a girl who strove
To drag it to dry land :
I stood to see the girl look round; her face
Had all her country's clear and definite grace.
49
50 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
She rested with the air of rest
So seldom seen, of those
Whose toil remitted gives a zest,
Not languor, to repose.
Her form was poised yet buoy ant, firm though free
And liberal of her bright black eyes was she.
Her hue reflected back the skies
Which reddened in the west;
And joy was laughing in her eyes
And bounding in her breast,
Its rights and grants exulting to proclaim
Where pride had no inheritance, nor shame.
Metfyought this scene before mine eyes,
Still glowing with yon sun,
Which seemed to melt the myriad dyes
Of heaven and earth to one,
A diverse unity, methought this scene,
These undulant hills, the woods that intervene,
The multiplicity of growth,
The cornfield and the brake,
The trellised vines that cover both,
The purple-bosomed lake,
Some fifty summers hence may all be found
Rich in the charms wherewith they now abound.
LAKE VAEESE 51
And should I take my staff again,
And should I journey here,
My steps may be less steady then,
My eyesight not so clear,
And from the mind the sense of beauty may,
Even as these bodily gifts, have passed away ;
But grant my age but eyes to see
A still susceptive mind,
All that leaves us, and all that we
Leave wilfully behind,
And nothing here would want the charms it wore
Save only she who stands upon the shore.
HENEY TAYLOB.
LAKE MAGGIORE
STANZAS
ADDRESSED TO W. E. TUENEE, E.A., ON HIS VIEW OF
THE LAGO MAGGIOEE FEOM THE
TOWN OF AEONA
TUENEE, thy pencil brings to mind a day
When from Laveno and the Beuscer Hill
I over Lake Verbanus held my way
In pleasant fellowship, with wind at will;
Smooth were the waters wide, the sky serene,
And our hearts gladdened with the j oyf ul scene ;
Joyful, for all things ministered delight,
The lake and land, the mountains and the vales ;
The Alps their snowy summits reared in light,
Tempering with gelid breath the summer gales ;
And verdant shores and woods refreshed the eye,
That else had ached beneath that brilliant sky.
To that elaborate island were we bound,
Of yore the scene of Borromean pride,
Folly's prodigious work; where all around,
Under its coronet, and self -belied,
Look where you will, you cannot choose but see
The obtrusive motto's proud "Humility !"
52
LAKE MAGGIORE 53
Far off the Borromean saint was seen,
Distinct, though distant, o'er his native town,
Where his Colossus with benignant mien
Looks from its station on Arona down ;
To it the inland sailor lifts his eyes,
From the wide lake, when perilous storms arise.
But no storm threatened on that summer day ;
The whole rich scene appeared for j oyance made
With many a gliding bark the mere was gay,
The fields and groves in all their wealth arrayed :
I could have thought the sun beheld with smiles
Those towns and palaces and populous isles.
From fair Arona, even on such a day,
When gladness was descending like a shower,
Great painter, did thy gifted eye survey
The splendid scene ; and, conscious of its power,
Well hath thine hand inimitable given
The glories of the lake and land and heaven.
ROBERT SOUTHEY.
TURIN
MOTHER AND POET
Turin, after News from Gaeta, 1861
DEAD ! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Dead ! both my boys ! When you sit at the feast
And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
Let none look at me!
Yet I was a poetess only last year,
And good at my art, for a woman, men said ;
But this woman, this, who is agoniz'd here,
The east and west sea rhyme on in her head
For ever instead.
What art can a woman be good at? Oh vain!
What art is she good at, but hurting her breast
With the milk-teeth of babes, and a smile at the
pain?
Ah boys, how you hurt ! you were strong as you
press'd.
And I proud, by that test.
64
TURIN 65
What art's for a woman ? To hold on her knees
Both darlings ; to feel all their arms round her
throat, *
Cling, strangle a little, to sew by degrees
And 'broider the long-clothes and neat little
coat;
To dream and to doat.
To teach them ... It stings there ! I made
them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them,
no doubt,
That a country's a thing men should die for at
need.
I prated of liberty, rights, and about
The tyrant cast out.
And when their eyes flash'd . . . O my beau-
tiful eyes! . . .
I exulted ; nay, let them go forth at the wheels
Of the guns, and denied not. But then the sur-
prise
When one sits quite alone! Then one weeps,
then one kneels !
God, how the house feels !
At first, happy news came, in gay letters moil'd
With my kisses, of camp-life and glory, and
how
56 THBOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
They both lov'd me ; and, soon coming home to be
spoil'd,
In return would fan off every fly from my brow
With their green laurel-bough.
Then was triumph at Turin : "Ancona was free !"
And someone came out of the cheers in the
street,
With a face pale as stone, to say something to me.
My Guido was dead ! I fell down at his feet,
While they cheer'd in the street.
I bore it ; friends sooth'd me ; my grief look'd sub-
lime
As the ransom of Italy. One boy remained
To be leant on and walk'd with, recalling the time
When the first grew immortal, while both of us
strain'd
To the height he had gain'd.
And letters still came, shorter, sadder, more
strong,
Writ now but in one hand, "I was not to faint
One lov'd me for two would be with me ere long :
And Viva I' Italia! he died for, our saint,
Who forbids our complaint."
My Nanni would add, "he was safe, and aware
Of a presence that turn'd off the balls, was
impress'd
TURIN 57
It was Guido himself, who knew what I could bear,
And how 't was impossible, quite dispossessed,
To live on for the rest."
On which, without pause, up the telegraph-line,
Swept smoothly the next news from Gaeta:
Shot.
Tell his mother. Ah, ah, "his" "their" mother,
not "mine,"
No voice says "My mother" again to me. What !
You think Guido forgot ?
Are souls straight so happy that, dizzy with
Heaven,
They drop earth's affections, conceive not of
woe?
I think not. Themselves were too lately forgiven
Through that LOVE and Sorrow which recon-
cil'd so
The Above and Below.
O Christ of the five wounds, who look'dst through
the dark
To the face of Thy mother ! consider, I pray,
How we common mothers stand desolate, mark,
Whose sons, not being Christs, die with eyes
turn'd away,
And no last word to say !
58 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Both boys dead? but that's out of nature. We
all
Have been patriots, yet each house must always
keep one.
'Twere imbecile, hewing out roads to a wall ;
And, when Italy's made, for what end is it done
If we have not a son ?
Ah, ah, ah ! when Gaeta's taken, what then ?
When the fair wicked queen sits no more at her
sport
Of the fire-balls of death crashing souls out of
men?
When the guns of Cavalli with final retort
Have cut the game short?
When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee,
W T hen your flag takes all heaven for its white,
green, and red,
When you have your country from mountain to
sea,
When King Victor has Italy's crown on his
head,
(And I have my Dead)
What then? Do not mock me. Ah, ring your
bells low,
And burn your lights faintly! My country is
there.
TURIN 59
Above the star prick'd by the last peak of snow :
My Italy's THERE, with my brave civic Pair,
To disfranchise despair !
Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength
And bite back the cry of their pain in self-
scorn ;
But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at
length
Into wail such as this and we sit on forlorn
When the man-child is born.
Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea,
Both ! both my boys ! If in keeping the feast
You want a great song for your Italy free,
Let none look at me.
(This was Laura Savio, of Turin, a poet and
patriot, whose sons were killed at Ancona and
Gaeta.)
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
THE RIVER PO
THE PO
THE Po, that, rushing with uncommon force,
O'ersets whole woods in its tumultuous course,
And, rising from Hesperia's watery veins,
The exhausted land of all its moisture drains
The Po, as sings the fable, first conveyed
Its wandering current through a poplar shade :
For when your Phaeton mistook his way,
Lost and confounded in the blaze of day,
This river, with surviving streams supplied,
When all the rest of the whole earth was dried,
And nature's self lay ready to expire,
Quenched the dire flame that set the world on fire.
LTJCAN.
Tr. Joseph Addison.
STANZAS TO THE PO.
RIVER, that rollest by the ancient walls,
Where dwells the lady of my love, when she
Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me ;
60
THE RIVER Po 61
What if thy deep and ample stream should be
A mirror of my heart, where she may read
The thousand thoughts I now betray to thee,
Wild as thy wave, and headlong as thy speed!
What do I say, a mirror of my heart?
Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong?
Such as my feelings were and are, thou art;
And such as thou art, were my passions long.
Time may have somewhat tamed them, not for-
ever;
Thou overflow'st thy banks and not for aye
Thy bosom overboils, congenial river !
Thy floods subside, and mine have sunk away.
But left long wrecks behind, and now again,
Borne in our old unchanged career, we move ;
Thou tendest wildly onwards to the main,
And I to loving one I should not love.
The current I behold will sweep beneath
Her native walls, and murmur at her feet ;
Her eyes will look on thee, when she shall breathe
The twilight air unharmed by summer's heat.
She will look on thee, I have looked on thee,
Full of that thought; and from that moment,
ne'er
Thy waters could I dream of, name, or see,
Without the inseparable sigh of her!
62 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Her bright eyes will be imaged in thy stream,
Yes ! they will meet the wave I gaze on now ;
Mine cannot witness, even in a dream,
That happy wave repass me in its flow !
The wave that bears my tears returns no more
Will she return by whom that wave shall sweep ?
Both tread thy banks, both wander on thy shore,
I by the source, she by the dark-blue deep.
But that which keepeth us apart is not
Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of earth,
But the distraction of a various lot,
As various as the climates of our birth.
A stranger loves the lady of the land,
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fanned
By the black wind that chills the polar flood.
My blood is all meridian ; were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures ne'er to be forgot,
A slave again of love, at least of thee.
'Tis vain to struggle, let me perish young,
Live as I lived, and love as I have loved ;
To dust if I return, from dust I sprung,
And then, at least, my heart can ne'er be moved.
LORD BYRON.
THE RIVIERA
RIVIERA DI PONENTE
ON this lovely Western shore, where no tempests
rage and roar,
Over olive-bearing mountains, by the deep and vio-
let sea,
There, through each long happy day, winding
slowly on our way,
Travellers from across the ocean, toward Italia
journeyed we,
Each long day, that, richer, fairer,
Showed the charming Riviera.
There black war-ships doze at anchor, in the Bay
of Villa-Franca ;
Eagle-like, gray Esa, clinging to its rocky perch
looks down ;
And upon the mountain dim, ruined, shattered,
stern, and grim,
Turbia sees us through the ages with its austere
Roman frown,
While we climb, where cooler, rarer
Breezes sweep the Riviera.
64) THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Down the hillside steep and stony, through the old
streets of Mentone,
Quiet, half -forgotten city of a drowsy prince and
time,
Through the mild Italian midnight, rolls upon the
wave the moonlight,
Murmuring in our dreams the cadence of a strange
Ligurian rhyme,
Rhymes in which each heart is sharer,
Journeying on the Riviera.
When the morning air comes purer, creeping up
in our vettura,
Eastward gleams a rosy tumult with the rising of
the day.
Toward the north, with gradual changes, steal
along the mountain-ranges
Tender tints of warmer feeling, kissing all their
peaks of gray ;
And far south the waters wear a
Smile along the Riviera.
Helmed with snow, the Alpine giants at invaders
look defiance,
Gazing over nearer summits, with a fixed, mys-
terious stare,
Down along the shaded ocean, on whose edge in
tremulous motion
THE RIVIERA 65
Floats an island, half transparent, woven out of
sea and air;
For such visions shaped of air, are
Frequent on our Riviera.
He whose mighty earthquake-tread all Europa
shook with dread,
Chief whose infancy was cradled in that old Tyr-
rhenic isle,
Joins the shades of trampling legions, bringing
from remotest regions
Gallic fire and Roman valour, Cimbric daring,
Moorish guile,
Guests from every age to share a
Portion of this Riviera.
Then the Afric brain, whose story fills the cen-
turies with its glory,
Moulding Gaul and Carthaginian into one all-con-
quering band,
With his tusked monsters grumbling, mid the alien
snow-drifts stumbling,
Then, an avalanche of ruin, thundering from that
frozen land
Into vales their sons declare are
Sunny as our Riviera.
Thus forever, in our musing, comes man's spirit
interfusing
Thought of poet and of hero with the landscape
and the sky ;
66 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And this shore, no longer lonely, lives the life of
romance only :
Gauls and Moors and Northern Sea-Kings, all are
gliding, ghostlike, by.
So with Nature man is sharer
Even on the Riviera.
JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.
MOONLIGHT ON THE RIVIERA
Buoyant, exulting
I thread in the morning
Orchards of olive
Up to the heights;
Wander at noonday,
Quietly pacing
Gardens of palm trees ;
Then in the evening
Loll in my balcony,
Over the boundless
Undulant ocean
Dreaming and dreaming.
Swift in the southland
Steals to the earth
Tranquil-browed evening.
And as a mother-hand softly,
THE RIVIERA 67
Crooningly patters
The back of her slumbering infant,
Softly the flood
Beats on the verdurous
Rim of the ocean:
Luller of continents,
Drowsily crooning
Ditties of cradle-land.
Slow reappear
From their dark deeps
Those divers the stars,
Singly at first,
Here one and here ;
Then all at once
Everywhere, everywhere,
Richly and richlier !
Glitters with gold-dust
The ample, the far-flowing
Mantle of Night
And with the stars
As if fraternally
Thoughts arise also.
Timid at first,
Scarcely they dare
Venture to rise
From the mysterious
Caves of emotion;
68 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
But their star-brothers
Speak to them, answer them.
Richly and richlier
Flaming they come;
Then all at once,
Everywhere ! everywhere !
Blindingly infinite.
Stand over me
Star-worlds and thoughts.
Now in her glory
Out of the flood
Rises the moon
Throwing across
A highway of light,
And the star-brothers
Wander upon it,
To thee, Beloved.
The sea is resplendent
And the palm-garlanded
Spurs of the mountains !
The earth is resplendent,
Resplendent the heavens
Arrayed in the moonbeams
And in thy love, Dearest !
RICHARD LEANDER.
Tr. Robert Haven Schauffler.
THE APENNINES
PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES
LISTEN, listen, Mary mine,
To the whisper of the Apennine ;
It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar,
Or like the sea on a northern shore,
Heard in its raging ebb and flow
By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day
Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,
Which between the earth and sky doth lay ;
But when night comes, a chaos dread
On the dim starlight then is spread,
And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
TO THE APENNINES
YOUR peaks are beautiful, ye Apennines !
In the soft light of these serenes t skies ;
From the broad highland region, black with pines,
Fair as the hills of Paradise they rise,
Bathed in the tint Peruvian slaves behold
In rosy flushes on the virgin gold.
70 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
There, rooted to the aerial shelves that wear
The glory of a brighter world, might spring
Sweet flowers of heaven to scent the unbreathed air
And heaven's fleet messengers might rest the
wing,
To view the fair earth in its summer sleep,
Silent, and cradled by the glimmering deep.
Below you lie men's sepulchres, the old
Etrurian tombs, the graves of yesterday ;
The herd's white bones lie mixed with human
mould,
Yet up the radiant steeps that I survey
Death never climbed, nor life's soft breath, with
pain,
Was yielded to the elements again.
Ages of war have filled these plains with fear:
How oft the hind has started at the clash
Of spears, and yell of meeting armies here,
Or seen the lightning of the battle flash
From clouds, that, rising with the thunder's sound,
Hung like an earth-born tempest o'er the ground !
Ah me ! what armed nations Asian horde
And Lybian host, the Scythian and the Gaul
Have swept your base and through your passes
poured,
Like ocean-tides uprising at the call
THE APENNINES 71
Of tyrant winds, against your rocky side
The bloody billows dashed, and howled, and died.
i
How crashed the towers before beleaguering foes,
Sacked cities smoked, and realms were rent in
twain ;
And commonwealths against their rivals rose,
Trod out their lives, and earned the curse of
Cain:
While in the noiseless air and light that flowed
Round your far brows, eternal Peace abode.
Here pealed the impious hymn, and altar flames
Rose to false gods, a dream-begotten throng,
Jove, Bacchus, Pan, and earlier fouler names ;
While, as the unheeding ages passed along,
Ye, from your station in the middle skies,
Proclaimed the essential Goodness, strong and
wise.
In you the heart that sighs for freedom seeks
Her image ; there the winds no barrier know,
Clouds come, and rest, and leave your fairy peaks ;
While even the immaterial Mind, below,
And Thought, her winged offspring, chained by
power,
Pine silently for the redeeming hour.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.
SAVONA
SAVONA
VESPERS ON THE SHORES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN
At Savona, a very ancient little city on the coast
of Genoa, there stands by the lighthouse a Ma-
donna about two feet high, under which are in-
scribed two Sapphic verses, which are both good
Latin and choice Italian, made by Gabriello
Chiabrera, "the prince of Italian lyric poets," who
was a native of Savona,
"In mare irato, in subita procella,
Invoco te, nostra benigna stella."
RELIGION'S purest presence was not found,
By the first followers of our Saviour's creed,
In stately fanes where trump and timbrel sound
Sent up the chorus in a strain agreed,
And where the decked oblation's wail might plead
For guilty man with Abraham's holy seed.
Not in vast domes, horizons hung by men,
Where golden panels fret a marble sky,
12
SAVONA 7S
-And things below look up, and wonder when
Those lifelike seraphim would start and fly!
Not where the heart is mastered by the eye
Will worship, anthem-winged, ascend most high.
But in the damp cathedral of the grove,
Where nature feels the sanctitude of rest,
Or in the stillness of the sheltered cove
Which noiseless waterfowl alone molest,
At times a reverence will pervade the breast
Which will not always come, a bidden guest.
Oft as the parting smiles of day and night
Flush earth and ocean with a roseate hue,
And the quick changes of the magic light
Prolong the glory of their warm adieu,
Each pilgrim on the hills, and every crew
On the lulled waters, frame their vows anew.
Then by the waves that lip Liguaria's land,
In Genoa's gulf, thou, wanderer ! must have
heard
What, more than hymns from Pergolesi's hand,
The living soul of adoration stirred,
And, like the note of Spring's first-welcomed bird,
Some thoughts awake for which there is no word.
The shipman's chant! as noting travellers tell,
In either language old and new the same ;
74 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
But more they might have truly said, and well,
For 't is a speech the universe may claim ;
Men of all times, all climes, and every name,
Devotion's tongue ! which from the Godhead came.
HYMN
Tost rudderless around the deep
By Apennine and Alpine blast,
Which o'er the surge in fury sweep,
And make a bulrush of our mast,
We murmur in our half -hour's sleep
To thee, Madonna ! till the storm be past,
In mare irato, in subita procella,
Invoco te, nostra benigna stella.
Whether for weeks our bark hath striven
And locked the lightning in its thunder caves,
We know whose hand its help has given,
With death in wild Sardinia's waves,
Or downward far as Tunis driven,
Threat us with life, the life of slaves ;
In mare irato, in subita procella,
Invoco te, nostra benigna stella.
O Virgin ! when the landsman's hymn,
At vesper time, on bended knee,
In sunlit aisle, or chapel dim,
Or cloister cell, is paid to thee,
SAVONA 75
Hear us that ocean's pavement skim,
And j oin our anthem to the raging sea :
In mare irato, in subita procella,
Invoco te, nostra benigna stella.
And when the tempest's wrath is o'er,
And tried Libeccio sinks to rest,
And starlight falls upon the shore
Where love is watching, uncaressed,
Though hushed the tumult and the roar,
Again the prayer we'll chant which thou hast
blest;
In mare irato, in subita procella,
Invoco te, nostra benigna stella.
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS.
COGOLETO
BOYHOOD OF COLUMBUS
I KNOW not when this hope enthralled me first,
But from my boyhood up I loved to hear
The tall pine-forests of the Apennine
Murmur their hoary legends of the sea,
Which hearing, I in vision clear beheld
The sudden dark of tropic night shut down
O'er the huge whisper of great watery wastes,
The while a pair of herons trailingly
Flapped inland, where some league-wide river
hurled
The yellow spoil of unconjectured realms
Far through a gulf's green silence, never scarred
By any but the North-wind's hurrying keels.
And not the pines alone ; all sights and sounds
To my world-seeking heart and fealty
And catered for it as the Cretan bees
Brought honey to the baby Jupiter,
Who in his soft hand crushed a violet,
Godlike f oremusing the rough thunder's gripe ;
Then did I entertain the poet's song,
My great Idea's guest, and, passing o'er
That iron bridge the Tuscan built to hell,
76
COGOLETO 7*7
The western main shook growling, and still gnawed
I heard Ulysses tell of mountain-chains
Whose adamantine links, his manacles,
1 brooded on the wise Athenian's tale
Of happy Atlantis, and heard Bjorne's keel
Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vinland shore:
For I believed the poets ; it is they
Who utter wisdom from the central deep,
And, listening to the inner flow of things,
Speak to the age out of eternity.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
GENOA
APPROACH TO GENOA
AT length the day departed, and the moon
liose like another sun, illuminating
Waters and woods and cloud-capt promontories,
Glades for a hermit's cell, a lady's bower,
Scenes of .Elysium, such as Night alone
Reveals below, nor often, scenes that fled
As at the waving of a wizard's wand,
And left behind them, as their parting gift,
A thousand nameless odors. All was still ;
And now the nightingale her song poured forth
In such a torrent of heartfelt delight,
So fast it flowed, her tongue so voluble,
As if she thought her hearers would be gone
Ere half was told. 'T was where in the northwest,
Still unassailed and unassailable,
Thy pharos, Genoa, first displayed itself ^
Burning in stillness on its craggy seat ;
That guiding star so oft the only one,
When those now glowing in the azure vault
Are dark and silent. 'T was where o'er the sea
(For we were now within a cable's length )
Delicious gardens hung ; green galleries,
78
GENOA 79
And marble terraces in many a flight,
And fairy arches flung from cliff to cliff,
'Wildering, enchanting ; and, above them all,
A palace, such as somewhere in the East,
In Zenastan or Araby the blest,
Among its golden groves and fruits of gold,
And fountains scattering rainbows in the sky,
Rose, when Aladdin rubbed the wondrous lamp ;
Such, if not fairer ; and, when we shot by,
A scene of revelry, in long array,
As with the radiance of the setting sun,
The windows blazing. But we now approached
A city far-renowned; and wonder ceased.
SAMUEL ROGERS.
GENOA
NIGHT AT THE PABADISO
AH ! what avails it, Genoa, now to thee
That Doria, feared by monarchs, once was thine?
Univied ruin ! in thy sad decline
From virtuous greatness, what avails that he
Whose prow descended first the Hesperian sea,
And gave our world her mate beyond the brine,
Was nurtured, whilst an infant, at thy knee?
All things must perish, all but things divine.
Flowers, and the stars, and virtue,- these alone,
The self-subsisting shapes, or self -renewing,
80 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Survive. All else are sentenced. Wisest were
That builder who should plan with strictest care
(Ere yet the wood was felled or hewn the stone)
The aspect only of his pile in ruin!
AUBREY DE VERB.
ON THE MONUMENT ERECTED TO
MAZZINI AT GENOA
ITALIA, mother of the souls of men,
Mother divine,
Of all that serv'd thee best with sword or pen,
All sons of thine,
Thou knowest that here the likeness of the best
Before thee stands ;
The head most high, the heart found faithfullest,
The purest hands.
Above the fume and foam of time that flits,
The soul, we know,
Now sits on high where Alighieri sits
With Angelo.
Nor his own heavenly tongue hath heavenly speech
Enough to say
What this man was, whose praise no thought may
reach,
No words can weigh.
GENOA 81
Since man's first mother brought to mortal birth
Her first-born son,
Such grace befell not ever man on earth
As crowns this One.
Of God nor man was ever this thing said:
That he could give
Life back to her who gave him, that his dead
Mother might live.
But this man found his mother dead and slain,
With fast-seaPd eyes,
And bade the dead rise up and live again,
And she did rise :
And all the world was bright with her through
him:
But dark with strife,
Like heaven's own sun that storming clouds bedim,
Was all his life.
Life and the clouds are vanish J d ; hate and fear
Have had their span
Of time to hurt and are not : He is here
The sunlike man.
City superb, that hadst Columbus first
For sovereign son,
Be prouder that thy breast hath later nurst
This mightier One.
32 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Glory be his forever, while this land
Lives and is free,
As with controlling breath and sovereign hand
He bade her be.
Earth shows to heaven the names by thousands
told
That crown her fame:
But highest of all that heaven and earth behold
Mazzini's name.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
GENOA
GENTLY, as roses die, the day declines ;
On the charmed air there is a hush the while;
And delicate are the twilight-tints that smile
Upon the summits of the Apennines.
The moon is up ; and o'er the warm wave shines
A faery bridge of light, whose beams beguile
The fancy to some far and fortunate isle,
Which love in solitude unlonely shrines.
The blue night of Italian summer glooms
Around us ; over the crystalline swell
I gaze on Genoa's spires and palace-domes:
City of cities, the superb, farewell !
The beautiful, in nature's bloom, is thine;
And Art hath made it deathless and divine !
WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON.
GENOA 83
SONNET
WRITTEN IN HOLY WEEK AT GENOA
I WANDERED through Scoglietto's far retreat,
The oranges on each o'erchanging spray
Burned as bright lamps of gold to shame the
day;
Some startled bird with fluttering wings and fleet
Made snow of all the blossoms, at my feet
Like silver moons, the pale narcissi lay,
And the curved waves that streaked the great
green bay
Laughed i' the sun, and life seemed very sweet.
Outside the young boy-priest passed singing
clear :
"Jesus the Son of Mary has been slain,
O come and fill his sepulchre with flowers."
Ah, God! Ah, God! those dear Hellenic hours
Had drowned all memory of thy bitter pain,
The Cross, the Crown, the Soldiers, and the
Spear.
OSCAR WILDE.
PAVIA
CHARLEMAGNE
OLGER the Dane and Desiderio,
King of the Lombards, on a lofty tower
Stood gazing northward o'er the rolling plains,
League after league of harvests, to the foot
Of the snow-crested Alps, and saw approach
A mighty army, thronging all the roads
That led into the city. And the King
Said unto Olger, who had passed his youth
As hostage at the court of France, and knew
The Emperor's form and face: "Is Charlemagne
Among that host?" And Olger answered: "No."
And still the innumerable multitude
Flowed onward and increased, until the King
Cried in amazement : "Surely Charlemagne
Is coming in the midst of all these knights !"
And Olger answered slowly : "No ; not yet ;
He will not come so soon." Then much disturbed
King Desiderio asked : "What shall we do,
If he approach with a still greater army ?"
And Olger answered : "When he shall appear,
You will behold what manner of man he is ;
But what will then befall us I know not."
84
PAVIA 85
Then came the guard that never knew repose,
The Paladins of France, and at the sight
The Lombard King overcome with terror cried :
"This must be Charlemagne !" and as before
Did Olger answer: "No; not yet, not yet."
And then appeared in panoply complete
The Bishops and the Abbots and the Priests
Of the Imperial chapel, and the Counts ;
And Desiderio could no more endure
The light of day, nor yet encounter death,
But sobbed aloud and said : "Let us go down
And hide us in the bosom of the earth,
Far from the sight and anger of a foe
So terrible as this !" And Olger said :
"When you behold the harvests in the fields
Shaking with fear, the Po and the Ticino
Lashing the city walls with iron waves,
Then may you know that Charlemagne is come."
And even as he spake, in the northwest,
Lo! there uprose a black and threatening cloud,
Out of whose bosom flashed the light of arms
Upon the people pent up in the city ;
A light more terrible than any darkness :
And Charlemagne appeared ; a Man of Iron !
His helmet was of iron, and his gloves
Of iron, and his breastplate and his greaves
And tassets were of iron, and his shield.
In his left hand he held an iron spear,
86 THBOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
In his right hand his sword invincible.
The horse he rode on had the strength of iron,
And color of iron. All who went before him,
Beside him, and behind him, his whole host,
Were armed with iron 2 and their hearts within
them
Were stronger than the armor that they wore.
The fields and all the roads were filled with iron,
And points of iron glistened in the sun
And shed a terror through the city streets.
This at a single glance Olger the Dane
Saw from the tower, and turning to the King
Exclaimed in haste, "Behold, this is the man
You looked for with such eagerness !" and then
Fell as one dead at Desiderio's feet.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
MODENA
MODENA
MODENA stands upon a spacious plain,
Hemmed in by ridges to the south and west,
And rugged fragments of the lofty chain
Or Apennine, whose elevated crest
Sees the last sunbeam in the western main,
Glittering and fading on its rippling breast ;
And on the top with ice eternal crowned,
The sky seems bending in repose profound.
The flowery banks where beautifully flow
Panaro's limpid waters, eastward lie;
In front Bologna, on the left the Po,
Where Phaeton tumbled headlong from the sky ;
North, Secchia's rapid stream is seen to go,
With changeful course in whirling eddies by,
Bursting the shores, and with unfruitful sand
Sowing the meadows and adjacent land.
ALESSANDRO TASSONI.
Tr. James Atkinson.
87
88 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
GINEVRA
IF thou shouldst ever come by choice or chance
To Modena, where still religiously
Among her ancient trophies is preserved
Bologna's bucket (in its chain it hangs
Within that reverend tower, the GuirlandineV
Stop at a palace near the Reggio Gate,
Dwelt in of old by one of the Orsini.
Its noble gardens, terrace above terrace,
And rich in fountains, statues, cypresses,
Will long detain thee ; through their arched walks.
Dim at noonday, discovering many a glimpse
Of knights and dames, such as in old romance,
And lovers, such as in heroic song,
Perhaps the two, for groves were their delight,
That in the spring-time, as alone they sat,
Venturing together on a tale of love,
Read only part that day. A summer sun
Sets ere one half is seen ; but, ere thou go,
Enter the house, prithee, forget it not,
And look awhile upon a picture there.
*T is of a lady in her earliest youth,
The very last of that illustrious race,
Done by Zampieri, but by whom I care not.
He who observes it, ere he passes on,
Gazes his fill, and comes and comes again ?
That he may call it up, when far away.
She sits, inclining forward as to speak,
Her lips half open, and her finger up,
As though she said, "Beware!" Her vest of gold
'Broidered with flowers, and clasped from head to
foot,
An emerald-stone in every golden clasp ;
And on her brow, fairer than alabaster,
A coronet of pearls. But then her face,
So lovely, yet so arch, so full of mirth,
The overflowings of an innocent heart,
It haunts me still, though many a year has fled,
Like some wild melody!
Alone it hangs
Over a mouldering heirloom, its companion,
An oaken chest, half eaten by the worm,
But richly carved by Antony of Trent
With Scripture stories from the life of Christ ;
A chest that came from Venice, and had held
The ducal robes of some old ancestor.
That by the way, it may be- true or false,
She was an only child; from infancy
The joy, the pride, of an indulgent sire.
Her mother dying of the gift she gave,
That precious gift, what else remained to him?
The young Ginevra was his all in life,
Still as she grew, forever in his sight;
And in her fifteenth year became a bride,
Marrying an only son, Francesco Doria,
90 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Her playmate from her birth, and her first love.
Just as she looks there in her bridal dress,
She was all gentleness, all gayety,
Her pranks the favorite theme of every tongue.
But now the day was come, the day, the hour;
Now, frowning, smiling, for the hundredth time,
The nurse, that ancient lady, preached decorum ;
And, in the lustre of her youth, she gave
Her hand, with f her heart in it, to Francesco.
Great was the joy; but at the bridal feast,
When all sat down, the bride was wanting there.
Nor was she to be found! Her father cried,
" 'Tis but to make a trial of our love !"
And filled his glass to ah 1 ; but his hand shook,
And soon from guest to guest the panic spread.
'T was but that instant she left Francesco,
Laughing and looking back, and flying still,
Her ivory-tooth imprinted on his finger.
But now, alas ! she was not to be found ;
Nor from that hour could anything be guessed
But that she was not ! Weary of his lif e,
Francesco flew to Venice, and forthwith
Flung it away in battle with the Turk.
Orsini lived; and long mightst thou have seen.
An old man wandering as in quest of something,
Something he could not find, he knew not what.
When he was gone, the house remained awhile
Silent and tenantless, then went to strangers.
Full fifty years were past, and all forgot,
MODENA 91
When on an idle day, a day of search
Mid the old lumber in the gallery,
That mouldering chest was noticed ; and 't was
said
By one as young, as thoughtless as Ginevra,
"Why not remove it from its lurking-place?"
'T was done as soon as said ; but on the way
It burst, it fell ; and lo, a skeleton,
W r ith here and there a pearl, an emerald-stone,
A golden clasp, clasping a shred of gold !
All else had perished, save a nuptial ring,
And a small seal, her mother's legacy,
Engraven with a name, the name of both,
"Ginevra." There then had she found a grave !
Within that chest had she concealed herself,
Fluttering with joy the happiest of the happy ;
When a spring-lock that lay in ambush there,
Fastened her down forever !
SAMUEL ROGERS.
BOLOGNA
IN THE PIAZZA OF SAN PETRONIO
DARK in the winter's crystal air arise
Bologna's turrets, and above them laughs
The mountain-slope all whitened by the snows.
It is that mellowest hour when the sun
His dying salutation on the towers
And, Saint Petronius, on thy temple sheds,
Towers whose battlements the broad-spread wings
Of many passing centuries have grazed,
And the grave temple's solitary peak.
The adamantine sky is gleaming cold
In its refulgence, and the air is drawn
O'er the piazza like a silver veil,
That lightly brushes with caressing touch
The threatening piles, whose grim walls gather
round,
Raised by our fathers' mail-encircled arms.
Still lingering on the mountain heights, the sun
Looks o'er the scene; and languidly his smile
Falls with suffusing tint of violet
92
BOLOGNA 93
On the grey building stones and on the dark
Vermilion brick, and seems to waken there
The living soul of vanished centuries ;
And wakens in the rigid winter air
A melancholy yearning for the glow
Of spring-times past, of warm and festal eves,
When here in the piazza used to dance
The beauteous women, and in triumph home
Returned the Consuls with their captive kings.
This in her flight the Muse is laughing back
Upon the verse in which vain longing throbs
For all the antique beauty that is gone.
GIOSUE CARDUCCI.
Tr. M. W. Arms.
TUSCANY
IN TUSCANY
DOST thou remember, friend of vanished days,
How, in the golden land of love and song,
We met in April in the crowded ways
Of that fair city where the soul is strong,
Ay! strong as fate, for good or evil praise?
And how the lord whom all the world obeys,
The lord of light to whom the stars belong,
Illumed the track that led thee through the
throng ?
Dost thou remember, in the wooded dale,
Beyond the town of Dante the Divine,
How all the air was flooded as with wine?
And how the lark, to drown the nightingale,
Pealed out sweet notes? I live to tell the tale.
But thou ? Oblivion signs thee with a sign !
EEIC MACKAY.
TUSCAN HILLS
MY Friend and I, we climbed together
Sweet-scented hill-sides covered over
With clusters of the lilac heather ;
Around us was the fair Spring weather,
She was my friend, I was her lover.
94
TUSCANY 95
Above us was that perfect heaven
One only sees in Tuscany.
Below us was the valley, riven
With budding vineyards green and even,
Far-stretching like a Summer sea.
She heard sweet music from the thrushes,
I, from her voice, that softer grew
When swift the birds sprang from the bushes,
And in those sudden, tender hushes
We only talked as friends might do.
O scented hills we climbed together!
O blue, far sky that bent above her !
She never will forget that heather,
That Tuscan day, that soft Spring weather,
Yet me she has forgot her lover.
CORA FABBRI.
FLORENCE
FLORENCE
THE brightness of the world, O thou once free,
And always fair, rare land of courtesy!
O Florence ! with the Tuscan fields and hills,
And famous Arno, fed with all their rills ;
Thou brightest star of star-bright Italy!
Rich, ornate, populous, all treasures thine,
The golden corn, the olive, and the vine.
Fair cities, gallant mansions, castles old,
And forests, where beside his leafy hold
The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn,
And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn ;
Palladian palace with its storied halls;
Fountains, where Love lies listening to their falls ;
Gardens, where flings the bridge its airy span,
And Nature makes her happy home with man ;
Where many a gorgeous flower is duly fed
With its own rill, on its own spangled bed,
And wreathes the marble urn, or leans its head,
A mimic mourner, that with veil withdrawn
Weeps liquid gems, the presents of the dawn;
Thine all delights, and every muse is thine ;
And more than all, the embrace and intertwine
96
FLORENCE 97
Of all with all in gay and twinkling dance !
Mid gods of Greece and warriors of romance,
See ! Boccace sits, unfolding on his knees
The new-found roll of old Maeonides ;
But from his mantle's fold, and near the heart,
Peers Ovid's holy book of Love's sweet smart !
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
FOR AN EPITAPH AT FIESOLE
Lo ! WHERE the four mimosas blend their shade
In calm repose at last is Landor laid ;
For ere he slept he saw them planted here
By her his soul had ever held most dear,
And he had liv'd enough when he had dried her
tear.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
THE STATUE AND THE BUST
THERE'S a palace in Florence, the world knows
well,
And a statue watches it from the square,
And this story of both do the townsmen tell.
98 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Ages ago, a lady there,
At the furthest window facing the east,
Asked, "Who rides by with the royal air?"
The bridesmaids' prattle around her ceased:
She leaned forth, one on either hand:
They saw how the blush of the bride increased.
They felt by its beats her heart expand,
As one at each ear, and both in a breath,
Whispered, "The Great-Duke Ferdinand."
That selfsame instant, underneath,
The Duke rode past in his idle way,
Empty and fine like a swordless sheath.
Gay he rode, with a friend as gay,
Till he threw his head back, "Who is she?"
"A bride the Riccardi brings home to-day."
Hair in heaps laid heavily
Over a pale brow spirit-pure,
Carved like the heart of the coal-black tree,
Crisped like a war-steed's encolure,
Which vainly sought to dissemble her eyes
Of the blackest black our eyes endure.
And lo, a blade for a knight's emprise
Filled the fine empty sheath of a man,
The Duke grew straightway brave and wise.
FLORENCE 99
He looked at her, as a lover can ;
She looked at him, as one who awakes,
The past was a sleep, and her life began.
As love so ordered for both their sakes,
A feast was held that selfsame night
In the pile which the mighty shadow makes.
(For Via Larga is three-parts light,
But the palace overshadows one,
Because of a crime which may God requite!
To Florence and God the wrong was done,
Through the first republic's murder there
By Cosimo and his cursed son.)
The Duke (with the statue's face in the square)
Turned in the midst of his multitude
At the bright approach of the bridal pair.
Face to face the lovers stood
A single minute and no more,
While the bridegroom bent as a man subdued,
Bowed till his bonnet brushed the floor,
For the Duke on the lady a kiss conferred,
As the courtly custom was of yore.
Li a minute can lovers exchange a word ?
If a word did pass, which I do not think,
Only one out of the thousand heard.
100 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
That was the bridegroom. At day's brink
He and his bride were alone at last
In a bedchamber by a taper's blink.
Calmly he said that her lot was cast,
That the door she had passed was shut on her
Till the final cataf alk repassed.
The world, meanwhile, its noise and stir,
Through a certain window facing east
She might watch like a convent's chronicler.
Since passing the door might lead to a feast,
And a feast might lead to so much beside,
He, of many evils, chose the least.
# # #
Meanwhile, worse fates than a lover's fate
Who daily may ride and lean and look
Where his lady watches behind the grate!
And she she watched the square like a book
Holding one picture, and only one,
Which daily to find she undertook.
When the picture was reached the book was done,
And she turned from it all night to scheme
Of tearing it out for herself next sun.
Weeks grew months, years, gleam by gleam
The glory dropped from youth and love,
And both perceived they had dreamed a dream,
FLORENCE
Which hovered as dreams do, still above,
But who can take a dream for truth?
O, hide our eyes from the next remove !
One day, as the lady saw her youth
Depart, and the silver thread that streaked
Her hair, and, worn by the serpent's tooth,
The brow so puckered, the chin so peaked,
And wondered who the woman was,
So hollow-eyed and haggard-cheeked,
Fronting her silent in the glass,
'"'Summon here," she suddenly said,
"Before the rest of my old self pass,
"Him, the carver, a hand to aid,
Who moulds the clay no love will change,
And fixes a beauty never to fade.
"Let Robbia's craft so apt and strange
Arrest the remains of young and fair,
And rivet them while the seasons range.
"Make me a face on the window there
Waiting as ever, mute the while,
My love to pass below in the square !"
# * #
But long ere Robbia's cornice, fine
With flowers and fruits which leaves enlace,
Was set where now is the empty shrine,
ITALY WITH THE POETS
(With, leaning out of a bright blue space,
As a ghost might from a chink of sky,
The passionate pale lady's face,
Eying ever with earnest eye
And quick-turned neck at its breathless stretch,
Some one who ever passes by),
The Duke sighed like the simplest wretch
In Florence, "So my dream escapes !
Will its record stay?" And he bade them fetch
Some subtle fashioner of shapes,
"Can the soul, the will, die out of a man
Ere his body find the grave that gapes?
"John of Douay shall work my plan,
Mould me on horseback here aloft,
Alive, (the subtle artisan !)
"In the very square I cross so oft !
That men may admire, when future suns
Shall touch the eyes to a purpose soft,
"While the mouth and the brow are brave in
bronze,
Admire and say, 'When he was alive,
How he would take his pleasure once !'
"And it shall go hard but I contrive
To listen meanwhile and laugh in my tomb
At indolence which aspires to strive."
* # *
ROBERT BROWNING.
FLORENCE 103
SANTA CROCE
IN Santa Croce's holy precincts lie
Ashes which make it holier, dust which is
Even in itself an immortality,
Though they were nothing save the past, and
this
The particle of those sublimities
Which have relapsed to chaos ; here repose
Angelo's, Alfieri's bones, and his,
The starry Galileo, with his woes ;
Here Machiavelli's earth returned to whence it
rose.
These are four minds, which, like the elements,
Might furnish forth creation; Italy!
Time, which hath wronged thee with ten thou-
sand rents
Of thine imperial garment, shall deny,
And hath denied, to every other sky,
Spirits which soar from ruin ; thy decay
Is still impregnate with divinity,
Which gilds it with revivifying ray ;
Such as the great of yore, Canova is to-day.
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
104* THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Their bones, distinguished from our common
clay
In death as life? Are they resolved to dust,
And have their country's marbles naught to
say?
Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust?
Did they not to her breast their filial earth in-
trust?
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 f orevermore
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.
Boccaccio to his parent earth bequeathed
His dust, and lies it not her Great among,
With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed
O'er him who formed the Tuscan's siren
tongue,
That music in itself, whose sounds are song,
The poetry of speech? No ; even his tomb
Uptorn, must bear the hyena bigots' wrong,
FLORENCE 105
No more amidst the meaner dead find room,
Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for
whom.
And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust ;
Yet for this want more noted, as of yore
The Cassar's pageant, shorn of Brutus' bust,
Did but of Rome's best son remind her more.
Happier Ravenna ! on thy hoary shore,
Fortress of falling empire, honoured sleeps
The immortal exile ; Arqua, too, her store
Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps,
While Florence vainly begs her banished dead, and
weeps. LORD BYRON.
SANTA MARIA NOVELLA
OR ENTER, in your Florence wanderings,
Santa Maria Novella church. You pass
The left stair, where, at plague-time, Macchiavel
Saw one with set fair face as in a glass,
Dressed out against the fear of death and hell,
Rustling her silks in pauses of the mass,
To keep the thought of how her husband fell,
When she left home, stark dead across her
feet,
The stair leads up to what Orgagna gave
Of Dante's daemons ; but you, passing it,
Ascend the right stair of the farther nave,
106 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
To muse in a small chapel scarcely lit
By Cimabue's Virgin. Bright and brave,
That picture was accounted, mark, of old !
A king stood bare before its sovran grace ;
A reverent people shouted to behold
The picture, not the king ; and even the place
Containing such a miracle, grew bold,
Named the Glad Borgo from that beauteous face,
Which thrilled the artist, after work, to think
That his ideal Mary-smile should stand
So very near him ! he, within the brink
Of all that glory, let in by his hand
With too divine a rashness ! Yet none shrink
Who gaze here now, albeit the thing is planned
Sublimely in the thought's simplicity.
The Virgin, throned in empyreal state,
Minds only the young babe upon her knee ;
While, each side, angels bear the royal weight,
Prostrated meekly, smiling tenderly
Oblivion of their wings ! the Child thereat
Stretches its hand like God. If any should,
Because of some stiff draperies and loose joints,
Gaze scorn down from the heights of Rafael-
hood,
On Cimabue's picture, Heaven anoints
The head of no such critic, and his blood
The poet's curse strikes full on, and appoints
To ague and cold spasms forevermore.
A noble picture ! worthy of the shout
FLORENCE 107
Wherewith along the streets the people bore
Its cherub faces, which the sun threw out
Until they stooped and entered the church door !
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
THE OLD BRIDGE AT FLORENCE
TADDEO GADDI built me. I am old,
Five centuries old. I plant my foot of stone
Upon the Arno, as St. Michael's own
Was planted on the dragon. Fold by fold
Beneath me as it struggles, I behold
Its glistening scales. Twice hath it overthrown
My kindred and companions. Me alone
It moveth not, but is by me controlled.
I can remember when the Medici
Were driven from Florence; longer still ago
The final wars of Ghibelline and Guelf .
Florence adorns me with her jewelry;
And when I think that Michael Angelo
Hath leaned on me, I glory in myself.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
THE VENUS DE MEDICI
BUT ARNO wins us to the fair white walls,
Where the Etrurian Athens claims and keeps
A softer feeling for her fairy halls.
108 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Girt by her theatre 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, redeemed to a new morn.
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
mould.
We gaze and turn away, and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fulness ; there, forever there,
Chained 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 Shep-
herd's prize.
FLOEENCE 109
Appearedst 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 vanquished 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,
Showered on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from
an urn !
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.
LOED BYEON.
GIOTTO'S TOWER
How MANY lives, made beautiful and sweet
By self-devotion and by self-restraint,
Whose pleasure is to run without complaint
On unknown errands of the Paraclete,
110 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Wanting the reverence of unshodden feet,
Fail of the nimbus which the artists paint
Around the shining forehead of the saint,
And are in their completeness incomplete!
In the old Tuscan town stands Giotto's tower,
The lily of Florence blossoming in stone,
A vision, a delight, and a desire,
The builder's perfect and centennial flower,
That in the night of ages bloomed alone,
But wanting still the glory of the spire.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
OLD PICTURES IN FLORENCE
THE morn when first it thunders in March,
The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say.
As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch
Of the villa-gate, this warm March day,
No flash snapt, no dumb thunder rolled
In the valley beneath, where, white and wide,
Washed by the morning's water-gold,
Florence lay out on the mountain-side.
River and bridge and street and square
Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,
Through the live translucent bath of air,
As the sights in a magic crystal ball.
And of all I saw and of all I praised,
FLORENCE 111
The most to praise and the best to see,
Was the startling bell-tower Giotto raised:
But why did it more than startle me?
Giotto, how, with that soul of yours,
Could you play me false who loved you so?
Some slights if a certain heart endures
It feels, I would have your fellows know !
Faith, I perceive not why I should care
To break a silence that suits them best,
But the thing grows somewhat hard to bear
When I find Giotto join the rest.
On the arch where olives overhead
Print the blue sky with twig and leaf
(That sharp-curled leaf they never shed),
'Twixt the aloes I used to lean in chief,
And mark through the winter afternoons,
By a gift God grants me now and then,
In the mild decline of those suns like moons,
Who walked in Florence, besides her men.
They might chirp and chaffer, come and go
For pleasure or profit, her men alive,
My business was hardly with them, I trow,
But with empty cells of the human hive;
With the chapter-room, the cloister-porch,
The church's apsis, aisle or nave,
Its crypt, one fingers along with a torch,
Its face, set full for the sun to shave.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Wherever a fresco peels and drops,
Wherever an outline weakens and wanes
Till the latest life in the painting stops,
Stands one whom each fainter pulse-tick
pains !
One, wishful each scrap should clutch its brick,
Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster,
A lion who dies of an ass's kick,
The wronged great soul of an ancient master.
For O, this world and the wrong it does !
They are safe in heaven with their backs to it,
The Michaels and Raf aels you hum and buzz
Round the works of, you of the little wit ;
Do their eyes contract to the earth's old scope,
Now that they see God face to face,
And have all attained to be poets, I hope?
'T is their holiday now, in any case.
ROBERT BROWNING.
THE STATUE OF LORENZO DE MEDICI
MARK me how still I am! The sound of feet
Unnumbered echoing through this vaulted hall,
Placed high in my memorial niche and seat,
In cold and marble meditation meet,
Or voices harsh, on me unheeded fall,
Among proud tombs and pomp funereal
Of rich sarcophagi and sculptured wall,
FLORENCE 113
In death's elaborate elect retreat.
I was a Prince, this monument was wrought
That I in honor might eternal stand ;
In vain, subdued by Buonarroti's hand,
The conscious stone is pregnant with his thought ;
He to this brooding rock his fame devised,
And he, not I, is here immortalized.
JAMES ERNEST NESMITH.
THE DUOMO
TWILIGHT the hour. How doubly twilight here,
Where early blent are roof and architrave
(As in a mountain hollowed to a cave),
And ev'n the glance of noonday is austere !
Now, what reverberations fill the ear,
As though commingling storm and torrent gave
Some waste place speech, or prophet message
clave,
For the first time, a desert vast and drear !
Source of the sounds, beyond the altar high*
A preaching monk. His burden he repeats :
"Gesu e Crist o!" How his accents thrill,
As, in the wild, the first evangel cry ! . . .
And still, I hear them, 'midst the murmuring
streets,
In twilight Florence, medieval still.
EDITH MATILDA THOMAS.
114* THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
SAN MINIATO
SEE, I have climbed the mountainside
Up to this holy house of God,
Where once that Angel-Painter trod
Who saw the heavens opened wide,
And throned upon the crescent moon
The Virginal white Queen of Grace,
Mary ! could I but see thy face
Death could not come at all too soon.
O crowned by God with thorns and pain !
Mother of Christ! O mystic wife!
My heart is weary of this life
And over-sad to sing again.
O crowned by God with love and flame !
O crowned by Christ the Holy One
O listen ere the searching sun
Show to the world my sin and shame.
OSCAR WILDE.
IN SAN LORENZO
Is thine hour come to wake, O slumbering Night?
Hath not the Dawn a message in thine ear?
Though thou be stone and sleep, yet shalt thou
hear
When the word falls from heaven Let there be
light.
FLORENCE 115
Thou knowest we would not do thee the despite
To wake thee while the old sorrow and shame
were near ;
We spake not loud for thy sake, and for fear
Lest thou shouldst lose the rest that was thy right,
The blessing given thee that was thine alone.
The happiness to sleep and to be stone:
Nay, we kept silence of thee for thy sake
Albeit we know thee alive, and left with thee
The great good gift to feel not nor to see ;
But will not yet thine Angel bid thee wake?
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.
FROM "LOVE IN ITALY"
THE air was heavy with the scent of flowers
When from the height of Fiesole we gazed
Where Brunelleschi's dome and the two towers
Shone in the sunset, like three fingers raised
To point a heaven where Art and Worship blend.
A last long spire of flame shot through the sky
And left thee sad: "The glory of the end,
How sweet to die in Florence !" was thy sigh.
But I replied, "Rather, the golden bars
Of day are burst : the world doth onward move
To larger life beneath the infinite stars,
The calm of night comes winged on the breath
Of roses, dearest heart. When Youth and Love
And Florence meet, can there be thought of
Death?" JOHN HALL INGHAM.
ARCETRI
THE TOMB OF GALILEO
I HAVE grown weary of the idle show
Of pompous Castle and pretentious Court,
Of Churches dingy wrecks of long ago
Of swords and guns in arsenal or fort.
I sicken at the sight of tarnished toys,
Of dead-and-buried mistresses of kings,
Of spears of warring barons bearded boys
Who fumed and fought for cheap and childish
things.
I care not for the saint of mythic fame,
Who wore brass haloes on an empty head ;
The so-called patriot, who in Freedom's name,
Heaped neighboring lands with hillocks of the
dead.
But here lies one, the brave, the great, the good,
Worth all the kings and queens the whole world
round ;
Make bare your head in reverential mood,
For here indeed you tread on Holy Ground.
116
AECETBI 117
His life, from selfish earthly motives purged,
Was consecrated unto you and me ;
He took the blow, that we might go unscourged,
And wore the chains, that we might wander free.
He found the long-lost Pleiad, Saturn's band,
And brought Jove's moons to yonder Tuscan
hill;
The second Joshua, at whose command
The heavens ceased turning and the sun stood
still.
The moon in starry-frosted skies of night
Shall write in splendor Galileo's name,
And sun to sun at noon and morning light
Shall blazon heaven with Galileo's fame.
WALTER MALONE.
THE RIVER ARNO
BY THE ARNO
THE oleander on the wall
Grows crimson in the dawning night,
Though the gay shadows of the light
Lie yet on Florence like a pall.
The dew is bright upon the hill,
And bright the blossoms overhead,
But ah ! the grasshoppers have fled,
The little Attic song is still.
Only the leaves are gently stirred
By the soft breathing of the gale,
And in the almost scented vale
The lonely nightingale is heard.
The day will make thee silent soon,
O nightingale sing on for love!
While yet upon the shadowy grove
Splinter the arrows of the moon,
118
THE RIVER AENO 119
Before across the silent lawn
In sea-green mist the morning steals,
And to love's frightened eyes reveals
The long white fingers of the dawn
Fast climbing up the eastern sky
To grasp and slay the shuddering night.
All careless of my heart's delight,
Or if the nightingale should die.
OSCAE WILDE.
VALLOMBROSA
VALLOMBROSA
THICK as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades,
High overarched, embower. . . .
JOHN MILTON.
VALLOMBROSA
AND Vallombrosa, we went to see
Last June, beloved companion, where sublime
The mountains live in holy families,
And the slow pine-woods ever climb and climb
Half up their breasts ; just stagger as they seize
Some gray crag, drop back with it many a
time,
And straggle blindly down the precipice !
The Vallombrosan brooks were strewn as thick
That June-day, knee-deep, with dead beechen
leaves,
As Milton saw them ere his heart grew sick,
And his eyes blind. I think the monks and beeves
Are all the same too : scarce they have changed
the wick
120
VALLOMBROSA
On good St. Gualbert's altar, which receives
The convent's pilgrims; and the pool in front
Wherein the hill-stream trout are cast, to wait
The beatific vision, and the grunt
Used at refectory, keeps its weedy state,
To baffle saintly abbots, who would count
The fish across their breviary, nor 'bate
The measure of their steps. O waterfalls
And forests! sound and silence! mountains bare,
That leap up, peak by peak, and catch the palls
Of purple and silver mist, to rend and share
With one another, at electric calls
Of life in the sunbeams, till we cannot dare
Fix your shapes, learn your number! we must
think
Your beauty and your glory helped to fill
The cup of Milton's soul so to the brink,
That he no more was thirsty when God's will
Had shattered to his sense the last chain-link
By which he drew from Nature's visible
The fresh well-water. Satisfied by this,
He sang of Adam's Paradise and smiled,
Remembering Vallombrosa. Therefore is
The place divine to English man and child ;
We all love Italy.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
VALLOMBROSA
English wanderer, where Etruria sings to thee
Songs of mountain and of forest fair,
Each clear stream with its beech-leaf burden
brings to thee
Days long flown, wherein Milton wandered there.
Scenes youth lit for his ardour and his purity
Age raised up when his outer eye was dim:
Vallombrosa, thy name through all futurity
Blends sweet tones with a sweeter tone from him.
ERNEST MYERS.
LA VERNA
THE CONVENT OF LA VERNA
THERE is a lofty spot
Visible amongst the mountains Apennine,
Where once a hermit dwelt, not yet forgot
He or his famous miracles divine ;
And there the convent of Laverna stands
In solitude, built up by saintly hands,
And deemed a wonder in the elder time.
Chasms of the early world are yawning there,
And rocks are seen, craggy and vast and bare,
And many a dizzy precipice sublime,
And caverns dark as death, where the wild air
Rushes from all the quarters of the sky :
Above, in all his old regality,
The monarch eagle sits upon his throne,
Or floats upon the desert winds, alone.
There, belted round and round by forests drear,
Black pine, and giant beech, and oaks that rear
Their brown diminished heads like shrubs between,
And guarded by a river that is seen
Flashing and wandering through the dell below,
Laverna stands.
BRYAN WALLER PROCTER.
123
LASTRA
LASTRA A SIGNA
SHE is old ! she is old, our Lastra !
Old with thousands of years ;
Yet her bold, brave gates stand up to-day
As in years agone, when her Tuscan spears
From the sunny hill-top drove at bay
Foe after foe, in reddening lines,
Over the crest of the Apennines.
She is old ! she is old, our Lastra !
Her noble walls are rent;
Yet they stand to-day on the great highway,
With the ruined battlement,
And the beacon tower, dark and gray:
She sees, like a dream, the Arno flow
By beautiful Florence, far below.
She is old ! she is old, our Lastra !
Yet Ferruchio held her dear ;
He gave her his heart, his sword, his life,
Yet she wasted never a tear,
With head unbowed in the bitter strife,
As on, through her gateway, the hosts of France
Passed at the traitor Baldini's glance.
They stormed at her walls, our Lastra !
They pierced her with fire and steel ;
124
LASTRA
Orange came down from the hills of Spain,
He trampled her turf with his iron heel,
Pillaged, and slew to her hurt and pain,
Till she fought no more ; her banners were rent,
And the warder gone from her battlement.
But they left her the gray old mountains,
And the green of her olive-fields ;
The blessed cross and the holy shrine,
And her marvellous carven shields,
Painted in colors rare and fine,
On the beautiful gateway, her crown and pride,
Dear to the hearts, where Amalfi died.
On the stones of her mighty watch-tower
Women spin in the sun ;
Pilgrims tread on her broad highway ;
Her days of battle are done.
Soft breezes blow o'er the scented hay,
And scarlet poppies bloom large and sweet,
By the blowing barley and fields of wheat.
She is older, our pride, our Lastra,
Than the tombs of Etruscan kings ;
She is wise with the wisdom of sages,
For her living she smiles and sings,
As she looks to the coming ages ;
And her dead, they whisper, "Waste no tear,
We only sleep, we are waiting here !"
SARAH D. CLARKE.
PISA
IN THE PINE FOREST OF THE CASCINE
WE wandered to the Pine Forest
That skirts the Ocean's foam,
The lightest wind was in its nest,
The tempest in its home.
The whispering waves were half asleep,
The clouds were gone to play,
And on the bosom of the deep
The smile of Heaven lay ;
It seemed as if the hour were one
Sent from beyond the skies,
Which scattered from above the sun
A light of Paradise.
We paused amid the pines that stood
The giants of the waste,
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude
As serpents interlaced,
And soothed by every azure breath
That under heaven is blown,
To harmonies and hues beneath,
As tender as its own ;
126
PISA 127
Now all the tree-tops lay asleep,
Like green waves on the sea.
As still as in the silent deep
The ocean woods may be.
How calm it was ! the silence there
By such a chain was bound,
That even the busy woodpecker
Made stiller by her sound
The inviolable quietness ;
The breath of peace we drew
With its soft motion made not less
The calm that round us grew.
There seemed from the remotest seat
Of the wide mountain waste,
To the soft flower beneath our feet,
A magic circle traced;
A spirit interfused around
A thrilling silent life,
To momentary peace it bound
Our mortal nature's strife;
And still I felt the centre of
The magic circle there
Was one fair form that filled with love
The lifeless atmosphere.
We paused beside the pools that lie
Under the forest bough,
Each seemed as 't were a little sky
Gulfed in a world below ;
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
A firmament of purple light,
Which in the dark earth lay,
More boundless than the depth of night,
And purer than the day;
In which the lovely forests grew,
As in the upper air,
More perfect both in shape and hue
Than any spreading there.
There lay the glade and neighbouring lawn,
And through the dark green wood
The white sun twinkling like the dawn
Out of speckled cloud.
Sweet views, which in our world above
Can never well be seen,
Were imaged by the water's love
Of that fair forest green.
And all was interfused beneath
With an Elysian glow,
An atmosphere without a breath,
A softer day below.
Like one beloved the scene had lent
To the dark water's breast
Its every leaf and lineament
With more than truth exprest,
Until an envious wind crept by,
Like an unwelcome thought,
Which from the mind's too faithful eye
Blots one dear image out.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
PISA 129
THE CAMP SANTO AT PISA
THERE needs not choral song, nor organ's
pealing :
This mighty cloister of itself inspires
Thoughts breathed like hymns from spiritual
choirs ;
While shades and lights, in soft succession stealing
Along it creep, now veiling, now revealing
Strange forms, here traced by painting's earliest
sires,
Angels with palms ; and purgatorial fires ;
And saints caught up, and demons round them
reeling.
Love, long remembering those she could not save,
Here hung the cradle of Italian Art :
Faith rocked it: like a hermit child went forth
From hence that power which beautified the earth.
She perished when the world had lured her heart
From her true friends, Religion and the Grave.
II
Lament not thou: the cold winds, as they pass
Through the ribbed fretwork with low sigh or
moan,
Lament enough : let them lament alone,
Counting the sere leaves of the innumerous grass
130 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
With thin, soft sound like one prolonged, alas!
Spread thou thy hands on sun-touched vase, or
stone
That yet retains the warmth of sunshine gone,
And drink warm solace from the ponderous mass.
Gaze not around thee. Monumental marbles,
Time-clouded frescos, mouldering year by year,
Dim cells in which all day the night-bird warbles,
These things are sorrowful elsewhere, not here:
A mightier Power than Art's hath here her shrine :
Stranger ! thou tread'st the soil of Palestine !
AUBREY DE VERB.
CAMPANILE DI PISA
SNOW was glistening on the mountains, but the air
was that of June ;
Leaves were falling, but the runnels playing still
their summer tune,
And the dial's lazy shadow hovered nigh the brink
of noon.
On the benches in the market rows of languid
idlers lay,
When to Pisa's nodding belfry, with a friend, I
took my way.
PISA 131
From the top we looked around us, and as far as
eye might strain,
Saw no sign of life or motion in the town or on
the plain.
Hardly seemed the river moving, through the wil-
lows to the main;
Nor was any noise disturbing Pisa from her
drowsy hour,
Save the doves that fluttered 'neath us, in and out
and round the tower.
Not a shout from gladsome children, or the clatter
of a wheel,
Nor the spinner of the suburb, winding his dis-
cordant reel,
Nor the stroke upon the pavement of a hoof or of
a heel.
Even the slumberers in the churchyard of the
Campo Santo seemed
Scarce more quiet than the living world that un-
derneath us dreamed.
Dozing at the city's portal, heedless guard the
sentry kept,
More than Oriental dulness o'er the sunny farms
had crept,
Near the walls the ducal herdsman by the dusty
roadside slept;
While his camels, resting round him, half alarmed
the sullen ox,
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Seeing those Arabian monsters pasturing with
Etruria's flocks.
Then it was, like one who wandered, lately, sing-
ing by the Rhine,
Strains perchance to maiden's hearing sweeter
than this verse of mine,
That we bade Imagination lift us on her wing
divine,
And the days of Pisa's greatness rose from the
sepulchral past,
When a thousand conquering galleys bore her
standard at the mast.
Memory for a moment crowned her sovereign mis-
tress of the seas,
When she braved, upon the billows, Venice and the
Genoese,
Daring to deride the Pontiff, though he shook his
angry keys.
When her admirals triumphant, riding o'er the
Soldan's waves,
Brought from Calvary's holy mountain fitting soil
for knightly graves.
When the Saracen surrendered, one by one, his
pirate isles,
And Ionia's marbled trophies decked Lungarno's
Gothic piles,
PISA 133
Where the festal music floated in the light of
ladies' smiles ;
Soldiers in the busy courtyard, nobles in the hall
above,
O, those days of arms are over, arms and cour-
tesy and love!
Down in yonder square at sunrise, lo ! the Tuscan
troops arrayed,
Every man in Milan armour, forged in Brescia
every blade :
Sigismondi is their captain, Florence! art thou
not dismayed?
There's Lanfranchi! there the bravest of the
Gherardesca stem,
Hugolino, with the bishop; but enough, enough
of them.
Now, as on Achilles' buckler, next a peaceful scene
succeeds ;
Pious crowds in the cathedral duly tell their bles-
sed beads ;
Students walk the learned cloister ; Ariosto wakes
the reeds ;
Science dawns; and Galileo opens to the Italian
youth,
As he were a new Columbus, new discovered realms
of truth.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Hark ! what murmurs from the million in the bust-
ling market rise!
All the lanes are loud with voices, all the windows
dark with eyes ;
Black with men the marble bridges, heaped the
shores with merchandise ;
Turks and Greeks and Libyan merchants in the
square their councils hold,
And the Christian altars glitter gorgeous with
Byzantine gold.
Look! anon the masqueraders don their holiday
attire ;
Every palace is illumined, all the town seems
built of fire,
Rainbow-coloured lanterns dangle from the top of
every spire.
Pisa's patron saint hath hallowed to himself the
joyful day,
Never on the thronged Rialto showed the Carnival
more gay.
Suddenly the bell beneath us broke the vision with
its chime.
"Signors," quoth our gray attendant, "it is al-
most vesper time."
Vulgar life resumed its empire, down we dropt
from the sublime,
PISA 135
Here and there a friar passed us, as we paced the
silent streets,
And a cardinal's rumbling carriage roused the
sleepers from the seats.
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS.
PISA: THE DUOMO
Lo, this is like a song writ long ago,
Born of the easy strength of simpler days,
Filled with the life of man, his joy, his praise,
Marriage and childhood, love, and sin, and woe,
Defeat and victory, and all men know
Of passionate remorses, and the stays
That help the weary on life's rugged ways.
A dreaming seraph felt this beauty grow
In sleep's pure hour, and with joy grown bold
Set the fair vision in the thought of man;
And Time, with antique tints of ivory wan,
And gentle industries of rain and light,
Its stones rejoiced, and o'er them crumbled gold
Won from the boundaries of day and night.
SILAS WEIR MITCHELL.
BATHS OF LUCCA
WRITTEN AT THE BATHS OF LUCCA
THE fireflies, pulsing forth their rapid gleams,
Are the only light
That breaks the night;
A stream, that has the voice of many streams,
Is the only sound
All around:
And we have found our way to the rude stone,
Where many a twilight we have sat alone,
Though in this summer-darkness never yet ;
We have had happy, happy moments here,
We have had thoughts we never can forget,
Which will go on with us beyond the bier.
The very lineaments of thy dear face
I do not see, but yet its influence
I feel, even as my outward sense perceives
The freshening presence of the chestnut leaves,
Whose vaguest forms my eye can only trace,
By following where the darkness seems most dense.
What light, what sight, what form, can be to us
Beautiful as this gloom?
136
BATHS OF LUCCA 137
We have come down, alive and conscious,
Into a blessed tomb :
We have left the world behind us,
Her vexations cannot find us,
We are too far away ;
There is something to gainsay
In the life of every day !
But in this delicious death
We let go our mortal breath,
Naught to feel and hear and see,
But our heart's felicity;
Naught with which to be at war,
Naught to fret our shame or pride,
Knowing only that we are,
Caring not what is beside.
LOED HOUGHTON.
CARRARA
THE HILLS OF CARRARA
The mountains of Carrara, from which nearly
all the marble now used in sculpture is derived,
form by far the finest piece of hill scenery I know
in Italy. They rise out of valleys of exquisite
richness, being themselves singularly desolate,
magnificent in form, and noble in elevation; but
without forests on their flanks, and without one
blade of grass on their summits.
I
AMIDST a vale of springing leaves,
Where spreads the vine its wandering root,
And cumbrous fall the autumnal sheaves,
And olives shed their sable fruit,
And gentle winds and waters never mute
Make of young boughs and pebbles pure
One universal lute,
And bright birds, through the myrtle copse
obscure,
Pierce, with quick notes, and plumage dipped in
dew,
The silence and the shade of each lulled avenue,
138
CARRARA 139
II
Far in the depths of voiceless skies,
Where calm and cold the stars are strewed,
The peaks of pale Carrara rise.
Nor sound of storm, nor whirlwind rude,
Can break their chill of marble solitude ;
The crimson lightnings round their crest
May hold their fiery feud
They hear not, nor reply; their chasmed rest
No flowret decks, nor herbage green, nor breath
Of moving thing can change their atmosphere of
death.
m
But far beneath, in folded sleep,
Faint forms of heavenly life are laid,
With pale brows and soft eyes, that keep
Sweet peace of unawakened shade ;
Whose wreathed limbs, in robes of rock arrayed,
Fall like white waves on human thought,
In fitful dreams displayed ;
Deep through their secret homes of slumber
sought,
They rise immortal, children of the day,
Gleaming with godlike forms on earth, and her
decay.
IV
Yes, where the bud hath brightest germ,
And broad the golden blossoms glow,
140 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
There glides the snake, and works the worm,
And black the earth is laid below.
Ah ! think not thou the souls of men to know,
By outward smiles in wildness worn ;
The words that jest at woe
Spring not less lightly, though the heart be torn
The mocking heart, that scarcely dares confess,
Even to itself, the strength of its own bitterness.
V
Nor deem that they whose words are cold,
Whose brows are dark, have hearts of steel ;
The couchant strength, untraced, untold,
Of thoughts they keep, and throbs they feel,
May need an answering music to unseal ;
Who knows what waves may stir the silent sea,
Beneath the low appeal,
From distant shores, of winds unfelt by thee?
What sounds may wake within the winding shell,
Responsive to the charm of those who touch it
well! JOHN RUSKIN.
LERICI
LINES WRITTEN NEAR SHELLEY'S
HOUSE
AND here he paced ! These glimmering pathways
strewn
With faded leaves his light, swift footsteps
crushed ;
The odour of yon pine was o'er him blown ;
Music went by him in each wind that brushed
Those yielding stems of ilex! Here, alone,
He walked at noon, or silent stood and hushed
When the ground-ivy flashed the moonlight sheen
Back from the forest carpet always green.
Poised as on air the lithe elastic bower
Now bends, resilient now against the wind
Recoils, like Dryads that one moment cower
And rise the next with loose locks unconfined ;
Through the dim roof like gems the sunbeams
shower ;
Old cypress-trunks the aspiring bay-trees bind,
And soon will have them wholly underneath:
Types eminent of glory conquering death.
141
THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Far down upon the shelves and sands below
The respirations of a southern sea
Beat with susurrant cadence, soft and slow :
Round the grey cave's fantastic imagery,
In undulation eddying to and fro,
The purple waves swell up or backward flee ;
While, dewed at each rebound with gentlest shock,
The myrtle leans her green breast on the rock.
And here he stood ; upon his face that light,
Streamed from some furthest realm of luminous
thought,
Which clothed his fragile beauty with the might
Of suns forever rising ! Here he caught
Visions divine. He saw in fiery flight
"The hound of Heaven," with heavenly ven-
geance fraught,
"Run down the slanted sunlight of the morn"
Prometheus frown on Jove with scorn for scorn.
He saw white Arethusa, leap on leap,
Plunge from the Acroceraunian ledges bare
With all her torrent streams, while from the steep
Alpheus bounded on her unaware:
Hellas he saw, a giant fresh from sleep,
Break from the night of bondage and despair.
Who but had sung as there he stood and smiled,
"Justice and truth have found their winged
child!"
LERICI
Through cloud and wave and star his insight keen
Shone clear, and traced a god in each disguise,
Protean, boundless. Like the buskined scene
All nature rapt him into ecstasies :
In him, alas ! had reverence equal been
With admiration, those resplendent eyes
Had wandered not through all her range sublime
To miss the one great marvel of all time.
The winds sang loud; from this Elysian nest
He rose, and trod yon spine of mountains bleak,
While stormy suns descending in the west
Stained as with blood yon promontory's beak.
That hour, responsive to his soul's unrest,
Carrara's marble summits, peak to peak,
Sent forth their thunders like the battle-cry
Of nations arming for the victory.
AUBREY DE VERE.
SAN TERENZO
SAN TERENZO
MID-APRIL seemed like some November day,
When through the glassy waters, dull as lead,
Our boat, like shadowy barques that bear the dead,
Slipped down the long shores of the Spezian bay,
Rounded a point, and San Terenzo lay
Before us, that gay village, yellow and red,
The roof that covered Shelley's homeless head,
His house, a place deserted, bleak and grey.
The waves broke on the doorstep ; fishermen
Cast their long nets, and drew, and cast again.
Deep in the ilex woods we wandered free,
When suddenly the forest glades were stirred
With waving pinions, and a great sea bird
Flew forth, like Shelley's spirit, to the sea!
ANDREW LANG.
144
SAN GIMIGNANO
BELOW SAN GIMIGNANO
MY city overmasters plain and hill,
With skyward turrets to the sun and storm.
Firm-set forever, but aspiring still,
It looms on high, an elemental form
Poised imminent aloft, superb and proud.
Against the hard blue ether it is warm
With the dull tint of bronze ; but when black
cloud
Rains down, and rims the farther hills with night,
It glimmers forth from out its murky shroud
Like a young beech-wood, tremulously white.
Nearby, it smiles with friendly sympathy,
Intimate, with the changing moods of light
Upon its towers, where jasmine dizzily
Clings in the weathered crannies of the stone.
It drowses on in grey serenity
Within a wall by ivy overgrown ;
The vines go rippling to the bastion-ledge,
And over it the olive-leaves are blown
Like hovering dust above the roadside sedge.
The gate stands wide to bid all welcome in;
Through it are seen wry-slanting roofs that edge
A broken line of sky, and walls wherein
145
146 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Are carved escutcheons of a long-dead race.
Familiar, yet mysterious, 'tis a place
Worthy a life's endeavouring to win.
But my path never led me to the gate.
Once only, I stood close beneath the wall
And heard a voice within, singing, elate,
Of life and love ; I saw the shadow crawl
Toward sunset, 'round the curving of the
keep;
I saw the level sunlight strike and fall
Shimmering down along the western steep
Of one gaunt tower above me, while the brown
Upon its southern wall was covered deep
In purple shadows. Then the sun went down.
And I aroused myself to seek a way
Into the friendly silence of the town;
But wall and tower had vanished with the day,
Down over all a phantom mist had drawn.
All night I sought along the hill, astray
O'er steeps, through thickets ; till the flushing sky
Lured my gaze up to where the city lay
Remote and beautiful against the dawn,
Serene and unattainable on high.
JOHN V. A. MAC MURRAY,
SIENA
SIENA
INSIDE this northern summer's fold
The fields are full of naked gold,
Broadcast from heaven on lands it loves ;
The green veiled air is full of doves ;
Soft leaves that sift the sunbeams let
Light on the small warm grasses wet,
Fall in short broken kisses sweet,
And break again like waves that beat
Round the sun's feet.
But I, for all this English mirth
Of golden-shod and dancing days,
And the old green-girt, sweet-hearted earth,
Desire what here no spell can raise.
Far hence, with holier heavens above,
The lovely city of my love
Bathes deep in the sun-satiate air
That flows round no fair thing more fair,
Her beauty bare.
There the utter sky is holier, there
More pure the intense white height of air,
More clear men's eyes that mine would meet,
And the sweet springs of things more sweet.
147
148 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
There for this one warm note of doves
A clamour of a thousand loves
Storms the night's ear, the day's assails,
From the tempestuous nightingales,
And fills, and fails.
O gracious city well-beloved,
Italian, and a maiden crowned,
Siena, my feet are no more moved
Toward thy strange-shapen mountain bound
But my heart in me turns and moves,
O lady loveliest of my loves,
Toward thee, to lie before thy feet
And gaze from thy fair fountain-seat
Up the sheer street ;
And the house midway hanging see
That saw Saint Catherine bodily,
Felt on its floors her sweet feet move,
And the live light of fiery love
Burn from her beautiful, strange face,
As in the sanguine sacred place
Where in pure hands she took the head
Severed, and with pure lips still red
Kissed the lips dead.
*****
For the outer land is sad, and wears
A raiment of flaming fire;
And the fierce, fruitless mountain stairs
Climb, yet seem wroth and loth to aspire,
SIENA 149
Climb, and break, and are broken down,
And through their clefts and crests the town
Looks west and sees the dead sun lie
In sanguine death that stains the sky
With angry dye.
And from the war-worn wastes without
In twilight, in the time of doubt,
One sound comes of one whisper, where,
Moved with low motions of slow air,
The great trees nigh the castle swing
In the sad colored evening ;
" Ricorditi di me, die son
La Pia" that small sweet word alone
Is not yet gone.
" Ricorditi di me" the sound
Sole out of deep dumb days remote
Across the fiery and fatal ground
Comes tender as a hurt bird's note
To where, a ghost with empty hands,
A woe-worn ghost, her palace stands
In the mid city, where the strong
Bells turn the sunset air to song,
And the towers throng.
With other face, with speech the same,
A mightier maiden's likeness came
Late among mourning men that slept,
A sacred ghost that went and wept,
150 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
White as the passion-wounded Lamb,
Saying, "Ah, remember me, that am
Italia." (From deep sea to sea
Earth heard, earth knew her, that this was she.)
"Ricorditi."
* * * * *
ALGEENON CHAELES SWINBUENE.
THE VILLA
LET me go back to when I saw you last.
Our lives till then had close together lain,
Shaped each to each in habit, feeling, thought,
Like almonds twinned within a single shell.
What thought or hope was mine that was not
yours ?
What joy was mine that was not shared with you?
All was so innocent when we were girls ;
Our little walks, the days you spent with me
In the old villa, where, with arms loose clasped
Around each other's waists, we roamed along
Among the giant orange-pots that stood
At every angle of our garden-plot,
And told our secrets, while the fountain plashed,
And, waving in the breeze, its vail of mist
Swept o'er our faces. Think of those long hours
We in the arched and open loggia sat
SIENA 151
Pricking the bright flowers on our broidery
frames,
And as we chatted, lifting oft our eyes,
We gazed at Amiata's purple height,
Trembling behind its opal veil of air ;
Or on the nearer slopes through the green lanes,
Fenced either side with rich and running vines,
Watched the white oxen trail their basket-carts,
Or contadine with wide-flapping hats
Singing amid the olives, whose old trunks
Stood knee-deep in the golden fields of grain.
Do you remember the red poppies, too,
That glowed amid the tender green of spring,
The purple larkspur that assumed their place
Mid the sheared stubble of the autumn fields,
The ilex walk, the acacia's fingered twigs,
The rose-hued oleanders peeping o'er
The terraced wall, the slanting wall that
propped
Our garden, from whose clefts the caper plants
Spirted their leaves and burst in plumy flowers ?
All these are still the same, they do not miss
The eye that loved them so ; and yet how oft
I wonder if those old magnolia-trees
Still feed the air with their great creamy flowers,
And show the wind their rusted under-leaf.
I wonder if that trumpet-flower is dead.
O heaven ! they all should be, I loved them so ;
Some one has killed them, if they have not died.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
But you can see the villa any day,
And I am wearying you. Yet all these things
Are beads upon the rosary of youth,
And just to say their names recalls those hours
So full of joy, each bead is like a prayer.
How many an hour I've sat and dreamed of them !
And dear Siena, with its Campo tower
That seems to fall against the trooping clouds,
And the great Duomo with its pavement rich,
Till sick at heart I felt that I must die.
People are kneeling there upon it now,
But I shall never kneel there any more ;
And bells rings out on happy festivals,
And all the pious people flock to mass,
But I shall never go there any more.
How all these little things come back to me
That I shall never see, no, nevermore !
O, kiss the pavement, dear, when you go back !
Whisper a prayer for me where once I knelt,
And tell the dead stones how I love them still.
WILLIAM WETMORE STORY.
MONTEPULCIANO
MONTEPULCIANO WINE
HEARKEN, all earth !
We, Bacchus, in the might of our great mirth,
To all who reverence us, and are right thinkers ;-
Hear, all ye drinkers !
Give ear, and give faith, to our edict divine,
Multepulciano's the King of all Wine !
At these glad sounds,
The Nymphs, in giddy rounds,
Shaking their ivy diadems and grapes,
Echoed the triumph in a thousand shapes.
The Satyrs would have joined them; but alas!
They couldn't ; for they lay about the grass,
As drunk as apes. TRANCESCO REDI.
Tr. Leigh Hunt.
158
LAKE THRASYMENE
LINES
WRITTEN AT THE VILLAGE OF PASSIGNANO, ON THE
LAKE OF THRASYMENE
THE mountains stand about the quiet lake,
That not a breath its azure calm may break ;
No leaf of these sere olive-trees is stirred,
In the near silence far-off sounds are heard ;
The tiny bat is flitting overhead ;
The hawthorn doth its richest odours shed
Into the dewy air ; and over all,
Veil after veil, the evening shadows fall,
Withdrawing one by one each glimmering height,
The far, and then the nearer, from our sight,
No sign surviving in this tranquil scene,
That strife and savage tumult here have been.
But if the pilgrim to the latest plain
Of carnage, where the blood like summer rain
Fell but the other day, if in his mind
He marvels much and oftentimes to find
With what success has Nature each sad trace
154
LAKE THRASYMENE 155
Of man's red footmarks labored to efface,
What wonder, if this spot we tread appears
Guiltless of strife, when now two thousand years
Of daily reparation have gone by,
Since it resumed its own tranquillity?
This calm has nothing strange, yet not the less
This holy evening's solemn quietness,
The perfect beauty of this windless lake,
This stillness which no harsher murmurs break
Than the frogs croaking from the distant sedge,
These vineyards dressed unto the water's edge,
This hind that homeward driving the slow steer
Tells how man's daily work goes forward here,
Have each a power upon me while I drink
The influence of the placid time, and think
How gladly that sweet Mother once again
Resumes her sceptre and benignant reign,
But for a few short instants scared away
By the mad game, the cruel, impious fray
Of her distempered children, how comes back,
And leads them in the customary track
Of blessing once again ; to order brings
Anew the dislocated frame of things,
And covers up, and out of sight conceals
What they have wrought of ill, or gently heals.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH.
156 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
THRASYMENE
Is this the spot where Rome's eternal foe
Into his snares the mighty legions drew,
Whence from the carnage, spiritless and few,
A remnant scarcely reached her gates of woe?
Is this the stream, thus gliding soft and slow,
That, from the gushing wounds of thousands,
grew
So fierce a flood, that waves of crimson hue
Rushed on the bosom of the lake below?
The mountains that gave back the battle-cry
Are silent now ; perchance yon hillocks green
Mark where the bones of those old warriors lie !
Heaven never gladdened a more peaceful scene ;
Never left softer breeze a fairer sky
To sport upon thy waters, Thrasymene.
CHARLES STRONG.
FAREWELL TO TUSCANY
WE pass ; but they remain.
What though our feet upon this mountain stair
Be upward, backward bent
Beneath the cold unpitying firmament,
With stress and strain ;
Yet all that was so passing fair,
We leave behind us in the warm transparent air.
LAKE THRASYMENE 157
We carry memories too :
Sad phantoms of the days we reckoned dear;
Strong tyrannous desires,
With hands that cling and eyes whose tears
are fires :
The wine is new \
Still on our lips of autumn here,
Which we too soon shall change for Alpine win-
ter drear.
Florence lies far behind ;
Her grave grey palace-fronts, her lily towers ;
The curves of Arno bright
With star-set lamps that tremble in the
night ;
Her wild west wind,
That shook those lightning-smitten showers
And flakes of sunbeams on the pale October
flowers.
How far the dancing waves
Of Spezia, where the silvered olives sleep,
And flower-sprent myrtle sprays
Sweeten the sunny air by silent bays !
The calm sea laves
Those crags but not for us and deep
Dreams on the sapphire cliffs and stairs of
marble steep.
158 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Ah me ! No more for us
Spreads the clear world-wide Tuscan land
divine ;
Fold over billowy fold
Of fertile vale and tower-set mountain old,
Innumerous.
As crowds of crested waves that shine
In sun and shadow on the spaceless ocean brine.
Soul-full we said Farewell !
What time those tears from flying storms were
cast
O'er Thrasymene and thee,
Loveliest of hills, whatever hills may be
Loved for the spell
Of names that in the memory last,
And with strange sweetness link our present to
the past !
Mont' Amiata, thou
Shalt take the envoy of this sorrow-song !
For thou still gazest down
On Chiusi, and Siena's marble crown,
The bare hill-brow
Where gleams Cortona, and the strong
Light of the lands I love, the lands for which I
long.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
UMBRIA
IN UMBRIA
UNDER a roof of twisted boughs
And silver leaves and noon-day sky,
Among gaunt trunks, where lizards house,
On the hot sun-burnt grass I lie ;
I hear soft notes of birds that drowse,
And steps that echo by
Unseen, along the sunken way
That drops below the city-wall.
Not of to-day, nor yesterday,
The hidden, holy feet that fall.
O whispering leaves, beseech them stay !
O birds, awake and call !
Say that a pilgrim, j ourneying long,
From that loud land that lies to west,
Where tongues debate of right and wrong,
Would be "The Little Poor Man's" guest ;
Would learn "The Lark's" divine "Sun-Song,"
And how glad hearts are blest.
159
160 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Say: "Master, we of over-seas
Confess that oft our hearts are set
On gold and gain ; and if, with these,
For lore of books we strive and fret,
Perchance some lore of bended knees
And saint-hood we forget ;
"Still, in one thought our lips are bold
That, in our world of haste and care,
Through days whose hours are bought and sold,
Days full of deeds, and scant of prayer,
Of thy life's gospel this we hold :
The hands that toil are fair.
"Therefore, forgive; assoil each stain
Of trade and hate, of war and wrath ;
Teach us thy tenderness for pain ;
Thy music that no other hath ;
Thy fellowship with sun and rain,
And flowers along thy path."
Thou dost not answer. Down the track
Where now I thought thy feet must pass,
With patient step and burdened back
Go, "Brother Ox" and "Brother Ass."
A mountain cloud looms swift and black,
O'ershadowing stone and grass.
The silver leaves are turned to gray ;
There comes no sound from hedge nor tree ;
UMBRIA 161
Only a voice from far away,
Borne o'er the silent hills to me,
Entreats : "Be light of heart to-day :
To-morrow joy shall be.
"The glad of heart no hope betrays,
Since 'Mother Earth' and 'Sister Death'
Are good to know, and sweet to praise."
I hear not all the far voice saith
Of Love, that trod green Umbriari ways,
And streets of Nazareth.
HELEN J. SANBORN.
PERUGIA
FROM PERUGIA
THE tall, sallow guardsmen their horse-tails have
spread,
Flaming out in their violet, yellow, and red ;
And behind go the lackeys in crimson and buff,
And the chamberlains gorgeous in velvet and ruff ;
Next, in red-legged pomp, come the cardinals
forth,
Each a lord of the church and a prince of the
earth.
What's this squeak of the fife, and this batter of
drum?
Lo ! the Swiss of the Church from Perugia come,
The militant angels, whose sabres drive home
To the hearts of the malcontents, cursed and
abhorred,
The good Father's missives, and "Thus saith the
Lord!"
And lend to his logic the point of the sword !
O maids of Etruria, gazing forlorn
O'er dark Thrasymenus, dishevelled and torn !
162
PEEUGIA 163
O fathers, who pluck at your gray beards for
shame !
O mothers, struck dumb by a woe without name !
Well ye know how the Holy Church hireling
behaves,
And his tender compassion of prisons and graves !
There they stand, the hired stabbers, the blood-
stains yet fresh,
That splashed like red wine from the vintage of
flesh,
Grim instruments, careless as pincers and rack
How the joints tear apart, and the strained sinews
crack ;
But the hate that glares on them is sharp as their
swords,
And the sneer and the scowl print the air with
fierce words !
Off with hats, down with knees, shout your vivas
like mad !
Here's the Pope in his holiday righteousness clad,
From shorn crown to toe-nail, kiss-worn to the
quick,
Of sainthood in purple the pattern and pick,
Who the role of the priest and the soldier unites,
And, praying like Aaron, like Joshua fights !
Is this Pio Nono the gracious, for whom
We sang our hosannas and lighted all Rome ;
164) THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
With whose advent we dreamed the new era began
When the priest should be human, the monk be a
man?
Ah, the wolf's with the sheep, and the fox with
the fowl,
When freedom we trust to the crozier and cowl !
Stand aside, men of Rome! Here's a hangman-
faced Swiss
(A blessing for him surely can't go amiss)
Would kneel down the sanctified slipper to kiss.
Short shrift will suffice him, he's blest beyond
doubt ;
But there's blood on his hands which would scarce-
ly wash out,
Though Peter himself held the baptismal spout !
Make way for the next! Here's another sweet
son!
What's this mastiff- jawed rascal in epaulets done?
He did, whispers rumor (its truth God forbid !),
At Perugia what Herod at Bethlehem did.
And the mothers? Don't name them! these hu-
mors of war
They who keep him in service must pardon him
for.
Hist ! here's the arch-knave in a cardinal's hat,
With the heart of a wolf and the stealth of a cat
(As if Judas and Herod together were rolled).
PERUGIA 165
Who keeps, all as one, the Pope's conscience and
gold,
Mounts guard on the altar, and pilfers from
thence,
And flatters St. Peter while stealing his pence !
Who doubts Antonelli? Have miracles ceased
When robbers say mass, and Barabbas is priest?
When the Church eats and drinks, at its mystical
board,
The true flesh and blood carved and shed by its
sword,
When its martyr, unsinged, claps the crown on his
head,
And roasts, as his proxy, his neighbour instead!
There! the bells jow and jangle the same blessed
way
That they did when they rang for Bartholomew's
day.
Hark ! the tallow-faced monsters, nor women nor
boys,
Vex the air with a shrill, sexless horror of noise.
Te Deum laudamus! All round without stint
The incense-pot swings with a taint of blood in't !
And now for the blessing ! Of little account,
You know, is the old one they heard on the Mount.
Its giver was landless, his raiment was poor,
166 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
No jewelled tiara his fishermen wore;
No incense, no lackeys, no riches, no home,
No Swiss guards! We order things better at
Rome.
So bless us the strong hand, and curse us the weak ;
Let Austria's vulture have food for her beak ;
Let the wolf -whelp of Naples play Bomba again,
With his death-cap of silence, and halter, and
chain ;
Put reason and justice and truth under ban ;
For the sin unf orgiven is freedom for man !
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.
ASSISI
THE SERMON OF ST. FRANCIS
UP soared the lark into the air,
A shaft of song, a winged prayer,
As if a soul, released from pain,
Were flying back to heaven again.
St. Francis heard ; it was to him
An emblem of the Seraphim ;
The upward motion of the fire,
The light, the heat, the heart's desire.
Around Assisi's convent gate
The birds, God's poor who cannot wait,
From moor and mere and darksome wood
Came flocking for their dole of food.
"O brother birds," St. Francis said,
"Ye come to me and ask for bread,
But not with bread alone to-day
Shall ye be fed and sent away.
"Ye shall be fed, ye happy birds,
With manna of celestial words ;
Not mine, though mine they seem to be,
Not mine, though they be spoken through me.
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168 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
"O, doubly are ye bound to praise
The great Creator in your lays ;
He giveth you your plumes of down,
Your crimson hoods, your cloaks of brown.
"He giveth you your wings to fly
And breathe a purer air on high,
And careth for you everywhere,
Who for yourselves so little care !"
With flutter of swift wings and songs
Together rose the feathered throngs,
And singing scattered far apart ;
Deep peace was in St. Francis' heart.
He knew not if the brotherhood
His homily had understood ;
He only knew that to one ear
The meaning of his words was clear.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
AT ASSISI
BEFORE St. Francis' burg I wait,
Frozen in spirit, faint with dread ;
His presence stands within the gate,
Mild splendour rings his head,
ASSISI 169
Gently he seems to welcome me :
Knows he not I am quick, and he
Is dead, and priest of the dead?
I turn away from the grey church pile ;
I dare not enter, thus undone :
Here in the roadside grass awhile
I will lie and watch for the sun.
Too purged of earth's good glee and strife,
Too drained of the honied lusts of life,
Was the peace these old saints won !
And lo ! how the laughing earth says no
To the fear that mastered me ;
To the blood that aches and clamours so
How it whispers "Verily."
Here by my side, marvellous-dyed,
Bold stray-away from the courts of pride,
A poppy-bell flaunts free.
St. Francis sleeps upon his hill,
And a poppy flower laughs down his creed ;
Triumphant light her petals spill,
His shrines are dim indeed.
Men build and plan, but the soul of man,
Coming with haughty eyes to scan,
Feels richer, wilder need.
How long, old builder Time, wilt bide
Till at thy thrilling word
170 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Life's crimson pride shall have to bride
The spirit's white accord,
Within that gate of good estate
Which thou must build us soon or late,
Hoar workman of the Lord?
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.
FROM ASSIS1
THE UMBRIAN PLAIN
THOU art a holy poem, sweet Umbrian plain,
Forever chanted to the angels' ear :
Thy tender vines beneath the hills austere,
Thy shining poppies and thy springing grain,
All murmur softly one melodious strain,
While Brother Wind breathes low that he may
hear,
And floating o'er thy far horizons clear,
Our Sister Clouds hearken the glad refrain.
A poem of love remembered : day by day,
Here, with some chosen brother of his band,
God's Little Poor One wandered, lorn and gay,
Weeping, yet singing on his homeless way
Lauds of the creatures : and the lovely land
Still holds his voice for those who understand.
HELEN J. SANBORN.
TERNI
THE FALLS OF TERNI
THE roar of waters! from the headlong
height
Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice :
The fall of waters ! rapid as the light
The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss :
The hell of waters ! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture ; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set.
And mounts in spray the skies, and thence
again
Returns in an unceasing shower, which round,
With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain,
Is an eternal April to the ground,
Making it all one emerald. How profound
The gulf ! and how the giant element
From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
Crushing the cliffs, which downward, worn and
rent
With his fierce footsteps, yield in chasms a fearful
vent
171
THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
To the broad column which rolls on, and shows
More like the fountain of an infant sea
Torn from the womb of mountains by the throes
Of a new world, than only thus to be
Parent of rivers, which flow gushingly,
With many windings through the vale; look
back!
Lo ! where it comes like an eternity,
As if to sweep down all things in its track,
Charming the eye with dread, a matchless
cataract,
Horribly beautiful ! but on the verge
From side to side, beneath the glittering morn,
An Iris sits, amidst the infernal surge,
Like Hope upon a death-bed, and, unworn
Its steady dyes, while all around is torn
By the distracted waters, bears serene
Its brilliant hues with all their beams unshorn :
Resembling, mid the torture of the scene,
Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.
LOED BYEON.
ORVIETO
AN EPISODE
VASAIII tells that Luca Signorelli,
The morning star of Michael Angelo,
Had but one son, a youth of seventeen summers,
Who died. That day the master at his easel
Wielded the liberal brush wherewith he painted
At Orvieto, on the Duomo's walls,
Stern forms of Death and Heaven and Hell and
Judgment.
Then came they to him, and cried: "Thy son is
dead,
Slain in a duel ; but the bloom of life
Yet lingers round red lips and downy cheek."
Luca spoke not, but listen'd. Next they bore
His dead son to the silent painting-room,
And left on tiptoe son and sire alone.
Still Luca spoke and groan'd not ; but he rais'd
The wonderful dead youth, and smooth'd his hair,
Wash'd his red wounds, and laid him on a bed,
Naked and beautiful, where rosy curtains
Shed a soft glimmer of uncertain splendour
Life-like upon the marble limbs below.
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174 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Then Luca seiz'd his palette : hour by hour
Silence was in the room ; none durst approach :
Morn wore to noon, and noon to eve, when shyly
A little maid peep'd in, and saw the painter
Painting his dead son with unerring handstroke,
Firm and dry-ey'd before the lordly canvas.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
VEII
THE DESOLATION OF VEII
'TWAS on a Sabbath morning that we wandered
in the wood,
Where near three thousand years ago the ancient
Veii stood;
There's not a sound of life there now, where wan-
dering alleys meet,
The cylamen and violet grow purple in the street !
The glens are deep and leafy, the fields are green
and bare,
And only scattered pottery tells that arts and
trade were there,
And looking towards the Alban Mount across the
solemn plains,
The ground on which we stand is all of Veii that
remains.
A hundred thousand people once dwelt upon this
hill,
Within their many-towered walls the hum was
never still.
The sculptor and the armorer worked as soon as
it was light,
175
176 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And watchman unto watchman called through all
the starry night.
They had laws, and arts, and customs, and altars
to revere;
They buried with a solemn care the dead whom
they held dear,
Whom they crowned with golden ivy and with oak-
leaves never sere.
And the city on the hill-top where this people had
their home
Was a larger town than Athens and a mightier
town than Rome.
A wondrous place is Veii, and the grandeur of her
past
Will linger in these solitudes and crown her to the
last.
Still I see her in a vision, though her very streets
are ploughed,
See the faces of her people, hear the voices of her
crowd,
See the waving of her banners, hear the tramp
of armed men,
Where nothing but the waterfall is dashing down
the glen.
Other cities have their columned hills and frag-
ments of their walls,
Or at least their ruined temples, on which the
moonlight falls.
VEH 177
Other cities have their solemn sights, to which
the pilgrim turns,
And some altar of tradition where a lamp forever
burns,
A ballad or a legend, or a few memorial stones,
And a breath of living history to reanimate their
bones.
But of Veii, strong and beautiful, these silent
stones are all,
Save her graves within the hillside and a patch
of ruined wall,
And the rocks cut sheer to guard her, and the
streams that flow the same,
And (foreign to the pilgrim's lips) the accents
of her name !
BESSIE RAYNER PARKES.
ROME
ROME
EVANDER then, Rome's earliest founder, spoke :
"These groves were once by native Fauns and
Nymphs
Inhabited, and men who took their birth
From tough oak-trunks. No settled mode of life
Had they, nor culture; nor knew how to yoke
Their steers, or heap up wealth, or use their stores
With frugal hands ; but the rough chase supplied
Their food, or boughs of trees. Then Saturn
came
From high Olympus, fleeing before Jove.
An exile from the kingdoms he had lost.
This stubborn race through mountain wilds dis-
persed
He brought together, and to them gave laws ;
And called the region Latium, since he had lurked
In safety on its shores. Beneath his reign
The golden age, so called, was seen. In peace
He ruled his people; till by gradual steps
There came a faded and degenerate age,
And love of war succeeded, and of gain.
Then came Ausonians and Sicanians;
178
ROME 179
And oft the name Saturnia was changed.
Then kings succeeded, and the form immense
Of rugged Thybris, from whom came the name
Tiber ; while that of Albula was lost.
Me, from my country driven to lands remote,
Chance and inevitable fate have placed
Upon these shores ; the nymph Carmentis too,
My mother, urging me with warnings dread,
And great Apollo who first prompted me."
Then moving onward, he an altar shows,
And gate, which now the name Carmental bears
In Rome; an old revered memorial
Of the prophetic nymph who first foretold
The future heroes of ^Eneas' line,
And noble Pallanteum; next, the grove
Points out, which Romulus the Asylum named ;
Then the Lupercal cool beneath the rocks,
Named after Pan, by old Arcadian wont ;
And Argiletum's grove he shows, and tells
Of Argus' death, his guest ; and calls the spot
To witness, he was guiltless of the deed.
Then on to the Tarpeian rock he leads
The way, and to the Capitol, now decked
With gold, then rough with bushes wild.
E'en then the dark religion of the place
Haunted the timorous peasants with vague fears.
"Within this grove, upon this wooded hill,"
He said, "some deity his dwelling made;
180 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
But who or what, none knows. The Arcadians
Think they have seen great Jove himself, when oft
With his right hand he shook his darkening shield,
And called his clouds around him. Yon two towns
With ruined walls thou seest, the relics old
And monuments of ancient days : this one
Was reared by Janus, that by Saturn built ;
Saturnia and Janiculum their names."
VIRGIL.
Tr. C. P. Cranch.
ROME
HE brought our Saviour to the western side
Of that high mountain, whence he might behold
Another plain, long, but in breadth not wide,
Washed by the southern sea ; and, on the north,
To equal length backed with a ridge of hills,
That screened the fruits of the earth, and seats of
men,
From cold Septentrion blasts ; thence in the midst
Divided by a river, of whose banks
On each side an imperial city stood,
With towers and temples proudly elevate
On seven small hills, with palaces adorned,
Porches, and theatres, baths, aqueducts,
Statues, and trophies, and triumphal arcs,
ROME 181
Gardens, and groves, presented to his eyes,
Above the height of mountains interposed :
(By what strange parallax, or optic skill
Of vision, multiplied through air, or glass
Of telescope, were curious to inquire,)
And now the Tempter thus his silence broke :
"The city, which thou seest, no other deem
Than great and glorious Rome, queen of the earth,
So far renowned, and with the spoils enriched
Of nations : there the Capitol thou seest,
Above the rest lifting his stately head
On the Tarpeian rock, her citadel
Impregnable ; and there Mount Palatine,
The imperial palace, compass huge, and high
The structure, skill of noblest architects,
With gilded battlements conspicuous far,
Turrets, and terraces, and glittering spires :
Many a fair edifice besides, more like
Houses of gods, (so well I have disposed
My aery microscope,) thou mayst behold,
Outside and inside both, pillars and roofs,
Carved work, the hand of famed artificers,
In cedar, marble, ivory, or gold.
JOHN MILTON,
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
ROME
O ROME ! my country ! city of the soul !
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires ! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
What are our woes and sufferance? Come and
see
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, ye
Whose agonies are evils of a day,
A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.
The Niobe of nations ! there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe ;
An empty urn within her withered hands,
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago.
The Scipio's tomb contains no ashes now ;
The very sepulchres lie tenantless
Of their heroic dwellers ; dost thou flow,
O Tiber, through a marble wilderness ?
Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her dis-
tress.
The Goth, the Christian, time, war, flood ? and
fire,
Have dealt upon the seven-hilled city's pride :
She saw her glories star by star expire,
ROME 183
And up the steep barbarian monarchs ride,
Where the car climbed the Capitol ; far and wide
Temple and tower went down, nor left a site.
Chaos of ruins ! who shall trace the void,
O'er the dim fragments cast a lunar light,
And say, "Here was, or is," where all is doubly
night ?
The double night of ages, and of her,
Night's daughter, Ignorance, hath wrapt, and
wrap
All round us ; we but feel our way to err :
The ocean hath its chart, the stars their map, v
And knowledge spreads them on her ample lap ;
But Rome is as the desert, where we steer
Stumbling o'er recollections ; now we clap
Our hands, and cry, "Eureka !" it is clear,
When but some false mirage of ruin rises near.
Alas, the lofty city ! and alas,
The trebly hundred triumphs ! and the day
When Brutus made the dagger's edge surpass
The conqueror's sword in bearing fame away!
Alas for Tully's voice and Virgil's lay
And Livy's pictured page! But these shall be
Her resurrection ; all beside decay.
Alas for Earth, for never shall we see
That brightness in her eye she bore when Rome
was free ! LORD BYRON.
184t THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
ROME
"Ir ever I in Rome should dwell,
Rome, the desired of all my heart,
Amidst that world loved long and well,
The infinite world of ancient art ;
"And there, by graves so dear to fame,
A dreaming poet, cast my lot ;
What voice within would whisper shame,
Were England and her needs forgot !"
So to myself, with museful mouth,
I said long since, the while I paced,
With heart that trembled towards the south,
Through London's coiled and stony waste.
How doubly dreary seemed the smoke,
The sunless noon, the starless even,
When o'er my dream a vision broke,
Italy! or the courts of Heaven!
Now, walking on this Pincian Hill,
And watching where the day declines
(Gilding the Cross of Peter still)
By Monte Mario's fringe of pines,
Almost, I think, the heart might grow
Forgetful of its earlier ties,
And all its life-blood learn to flow
Familiar with Italian skies.
ROME 185
Not with the love of brain or soul,
But with that fiery strength we use
In leaning towards the strong control
Of what we must, not what we choose.
As mother for child, as wife for spouse,
As one long exiled yearns for home,
As sinner for the Heavenly House,
So yearned, so loved I thee, O Rome!
Now I have seen thee, seen the plains,
The desolate plains where thou dost lie ;
Where many a rock-built tomb complains
Of some great name or race gone by,
And past the walls that round thee sweep
Have daily ridden, walls sublime!
Which girdle in thy power, and keep
Inviolate from the hands of Time.
Just touched and softened by decay,
Each gate some glorious year recalls ;
Kings! Consuls! Emperors! Saints were they
Who mile by mile linked walls to walls.
All ancient cities, though great they be
(And London counts by tens of tens),
Seem pygmy towns compared to thee ;
While Lincoln, throned amidst her fens,
186 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And York upon her meadow-side
(A thousand milestones on her road),
Are footprints, just to show the stride
With which the giant Csesar strode !
Yet here, where Csesar lies in state,
Amidst the cypress and the rose,
A lovelier mountain mourns his fate,
A nobler river swiftlier flows.
starlit streets of ancient Rome,
Baptized in blood of Christian men !
Happy the hearts that call ye home,
And feet that toward ye turn again !
1 oft in dreams shall seem to see
Hills where the olive and the vine
Fall rippling down to meet the sea ;
Or underneath the branching pine
Shall watch the storm-clouds sweeping by,
Down from the Alban Mount in swirls,
And, blackening all the vaulted sky,
Rush tangling through our sculptor's curls.
Ah ! not too distant fall that day
When I, a pilgrim far from home,
Shall hear upon the Aurelian Way,
"Allans, postilion, vite! a Rome."
BESSIE RAYNER PARKES.
ROME 187
DREAMS IN ROME
WHAT is it that sings a sleepy tune in my head?
Some faint old unforgotten moon that is dead?
I will arise, for the dreams are about my bed.
O is it in vain, is it in vain I have come?
Dark was the road in coming, and white the foam.
Is there no rest for me here? are there dreams in
Rome?
ARTHUR SYMONS.
ROMA
RIPE hours there be that do anticipate
The heritage of death, and bid us see,
As from the vantage of eternity,
The shadow-symbols of historic fate.
Swift through the gloom each mournful chariot
rolls,
Dim shapes of empire urge the flying steeds,
Featured with man's irrevocable deeds,
Robed with the changeful passions of men's souls.
188 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Ethereal visions pass serene in prayer,
Their eyes aglow with sacrificial light;
Phantoms of creeds long dead, their garments
bright,
Drip red with blood of torture and despair.
In such an hour my spirit did behold
A woman wonderful. Unnumbered years
Left in her eyes the beauty born of tears,
And full they were of fatal stories old.
The trophies of her immemorial reign
The shadowy great of eld beside her bore ;
A broidery of ancient song she wore,
And the glad muses held her regal train.
Still hath she kingdom o'er the souls of men ;
Dear is she always in her less estate.
The sad, the gay, the thoughtful, on her wait,
Praising her evermore with tongue and pen.
Stately her ways and sweet, and all her own ;
As one who has forgotten time she lives,
Loves, loses, lures anew, and ever gives,
She who all misery and all joy hath known.
If thou wouldst see her, as the twilight fails,
Go forth along the ancient street of tombs,
And when the purple shade divinely glooms
High o'er the Alban hills, and night prevails,
ROME 189
If then she is not with thee while the light
Glows over roof and column, tower and dome,
And the dead stir beneath thy feet, and Rome
Lies in the solemn keeping of the night,
If then she be not thine, not thine the lot
Of those some angel rescues for an hour
From earth's mean limitations, granting power
To see as man may see when time is not.
SILAS WEIR MITCHELL.
ROME UNVISITED
THE corn has turned from grey to red,
Since first my spirit wandered forth
From the dear cities of the north,
And to Italians mountains fled.
And here I set my face towards home,
For all my pilgrimage is done,
Although, methinks yon blood-red sun
Marshals the way to Holy Rome.
O Blessed Lady, who dost hold
Upon the seven hills thy reign!
O Mother without blot or stain,
Crowned with bright crowns of triple gold!
190 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
O Roma, Roma, at thy feet
I lay this barren gift of song!
For, ah ! the way is steep and long
That leads unto thy sacred street.
OSCAR WILDE.
ROME
ROME, on thine air I cast my soul adrift,
To soar sublime ; do thou, O Rome, receive
This soul of mine and flood it with thy light.
Not curiously concerned with little things
To thee I come ; who is there that would seek
For butterflies beneath the Arch of Titus?
******
Do thou but shed thine azure round me, Rome,
Illumine me with sunlight ; all-divine
Are the sun's rays in thy vast azure spaces.
They bless alike the dusky Vatican,
The beauteous Quirinal, and ancient there
The Capitol, amongst all ruins holy.
And from thy seven hills thou stretchest forth
Thine arms, O Rome, to meet the love diffused,
A radiant splendour, through the quiet air.
ROME 191
The solitudes of the Campagna form
That nuptial-couch ; and thou, O hoar Soratte,
Thou art the witness in eternity.
O Alban Mountains, sing ye smilingly
The epithalamium ; green Tusculum
Sing thou ; and sing, O fertile Tivoli !
Whilst I from the Janiculum look down
With wonder on the city's pictured form
A mighty ship, launched toward the world's
dominion.
O ship, whose poop rising on high attains
The infinite, bear with thee on thy passage
My soul unto the shores of mystery!
Let me, when fall those twilights radiant
With the white jewels of the coming night,
Quietly linger on the Flaminian Way ;
Then may the hour supreme, in fleeing, brush
With silent wing my forehead, while I pass
Unknown through this serenity of peace,
Pass to the Councils of the Shades, and see
Once more the lofty spirits of the Fathers
Conversing there beside the sacred river.
GIOSUE CARDUCCI.
Tr. M. W. Arms.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
ROME
A HIGH and naked square, a lonely palm ;
Columns thrown down, a high and lonely tower ;
The tawny river, ominously fouled ;
Cypresses in a garden, old with calm ;
Two monks who pass in white, sandaled and
cowled ;
Empires of glory in a narrow hour
From sunset unto starlight, when the sky
Wakened to death behind St. Peter's dome:
That, in an eyelid's lifting, you and I
Will see wherever any man says "Rome."
ARTHUR SYMONS.
HILLS OF ROME
SHE, whose high top above the starres did sore,
One f oote on Thetis, th' other on the Morning,
One hand on Scythia, th' other on the More,
Both heaven and earth in roundnesse compassing ;
love fearing, least if she should greater growe,
The Giants old should once againe uprise,
Her whelm'd with hills, these Seven Hills, which be
nowe
Tombes of her greatnes which did threate the
skies :
ROME 193
Upon her head he heapt Mount Saturnal
Upon her bellie th' antique Palatine,
Upon her stomacke laid Mount Quirinal,
On her left hand the noysome Esquiline,
And Caelian on the right : but both her feete
Mount Viminal and Aventine doo meete.
JOACHIM DU BELLAY.
Tr. Edmund Spenser.
MONTE CAVALLO.
YE, too, marvellous twain, that erect on the Monte
Cavallo
Stand by your rearing steeds in the grace of your
motionless movement,
Stand with your upstretched arms and tranquil
regardant faces,
Stand as instinct with life in the might of immuta-
ble manhood,
O ye mighty and strange, ye ancient divine ones
of Hellas,
Are ye Christian too? to convert and redeem and
renew you,
Will the brief form have sufficed, that a pope has
set up on the apex
Of the Egyptian stone that o'ertops you, the
Christian symbol?
194 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And ye, silent, supreme in serene and victorious
marble,
Ye that encircle the walls of the stately Vatican
chambers,
Juno and Ceres, Minerva, Apollo, the Muses and
Bacchus,
Ye unto whom far and near come posting the
Christian pilgrims,
Ye that are ranged in the halls of the mystic
Christian pontiff,
Are ye also baptised? are ye of the Kingdom of
Heaven ?
Utter, O some one, the word that shall reconcile
Ancient and Modern !
Am I to turn me for this unto thee, great Chapel
of Sixtus?
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
THE C^ELIAN HILL
Or all the seven which Rome doth boast,
(Fair hills and nobly crowned !)
I love the Caelian Hill the most,
And think it holy ground.
'T was here the deacon Laurence died,
And here was Gregory's cell ;
The heart by honors sorely tried
Remembered it right well ; -
ROME 195
And as his pious envoys bore
The British cross on high,
He, like a sailor turned from shore,
Looked backward with a sigh,
And though he held within his hand
The Church from east to west,
He thought of all the Christian land
This Caelian Hill the best.
I cannot tell, I know not why,
But Rome from thence doth wear
Peculiar brightness in the sky
And beauty in the air.
A dreamy light is in the trees,
The winding walks are still,
And quietly the perfumed breeze
. Creeps o'er the Caslian Hill.
As tranquil convents faintly chime
The passing hours of prayer,
They give the only hints that time
Has marked its progress there.
The martyr's home, the saint's retreat.
Have filled the place with rest,
The centuries with silent feet
Have touched its leafy crest ;
196 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And Gregory, rising from his sleep,
Himself would scarcely know
That past of his was buried deep
A thousand years ago !
BESSIE RAYNER PARKES.
THE RUINES OF ROME
THOU stranger, which for Rome in Rome here
seekest,
And nought of Rome in Rome perceivst at all,
These same olde walls, olde arches, which thou
seest,
Olde palaces, is that which Rome men call.
Beholde what wreake, what ruine, and what wast,
And how that she, which with her mightie powre
Tam'd all the world, hath tam'd herself e at last ;
The pray of Time, which all things doth devowre !
Rome now of Rome is th' onely funerall,
And onely Rome of Rome hath victorie ;
Ne ought save Tyber hastning to his fall
Remaines of all : O worlds inconstancie !
That which is firme doth flit and fall away,
And that is flitting doth abide and stay.
ROME 197
II
These heapes of stones, these old wals, which ye
see,
Were first enclosures but of salvage soyle ;
And these brave pallaces, which maystred bee
Of Time, were shepheards cottages somewhile.
Then tooke the shepheards kingly ornaments,
And the stout hynde arm'd his right hand with
steele :
Eftsoones their rule of yearely Presidents
Grew great, and sixe months greater a great
deele ;
Which, made perpetuall, rose to so great height,
That thence th' Imperiall Eagle rooting tooke,
Till th' heaven it selfe, opposing gainst her might,
Her power to Peters successor betooke ;
Who, shepheardlike, (as Fates the same fore-
seeing,)
Doth shew that all things turne to their first
being.
Ill
O that I had the Thracian Poets harpe,
For to awake out of th' infernall shade
Those antique Caesars, sleeping long in darke,
The which this auncient Citie whilome made !
Or that I had Amphions instrument,
To quicken, with his vitall notes accord.
The stonie ioynts of these old walls now rent,
By which th' Ausonian light might be restor'd !
198 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Or that at last I could, with pencill fine,
Fashion the pourtraicts of these palacis,
By paterae of great Virgils spirit divine !
I would assay with that which in me is,
To builde, with levell of my lof tie style,
That which no hands can evermore compyle.
JOACHIM DU BELLAY.
Tr. Edmund Spenser.
THE COLISEUM
AND here the buzz of eager nations ran,
In murmured pity, or loud-roared applause,
As man was slaughtered by his fellow-man.
And wherefore slaughtered? Wherefore, but
because
Such were the bloody Circus' genial laws,
And the imperial pleasure. Wherefore not ?
What matters where we fall to fill the maws
Of worms, on battle-plains or listed spot?
Both are but theatres where the chief actors rot.
I see before me the Gladiator lie :
He leans upon his hand, his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his drooped head sinks gradually low,
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow:
ROME 199
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one.
Like the first of a thunder-shower ; and now
The arena swims around him : he is gone,
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the
wretch who won.
He heard it, but he heeded not: his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away ;
He recked not of the life he lost nor prize,
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
There were his young barbarians all at play,
There was their Dacian mother, he, their sire,
Butchered to make a Roman holiday,
All this rushed with his blood. Shall he expire,
And unavenged? Arise! ye Goths, and glut your
ire!
But here, where murder breathed her bloody
steam ;
And here, where buzzing nations choked the
ways,
And roared or murmured like a mountain-
stream
Dashing or winding as its torrent strays ;
Here, where the Roman million's blame or praise
Was death or life, the playthings of a crowd,
My voice sounds much, and fall the stars'
faint rays
On the arena void, seats crushed, walls bowed,
200 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And galleries, where my steps seem echoes
strangely loud.
A ruin, yet what ruin ! from its mass
Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been reared ;
Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,
And marvel where the spoil could have
appeared.
Hath it indeed been plundered, or but cleared?
Alas ! developed, opens the decay,
When the colossal fabric's form is neared :
It will not bear the brightness of the day,
Which streams too much on all years, man, have
reft away.
But when the rising moon begins to climb
Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
When the stars twinkle through the loops of
time,
And the low night-breeze waves along the air,
The garland-forest, which the gray walls wear,
Like laurels on the bald first Caesar's head ;
When the light shines serene, but doth not
glare,
Then in this magic circle raise the dead:
Heroes have trod this spot, 'tis on their dust ye
tread.
"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand ;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall ;
ROME 201
And when Rome falls the World." From our
own land
Thus spake the pilgrims o'er this mighty wall
In Saxon times, which we are wont to call
Ancient ; and these three mortal things are still
On their foundations, and unaltered all;
Rome and her Ruin past Redemption's skill,
The world the same wide den of thieves, or
what ye will.
*****
Arches on arches ! as it were that Rome,
Collecting the chief trophies of her line,
Would build up all her triumphs in one dome,
Her Coliseum stands ; the moonbeams shine
As 't were its natural torches, for divine
Should be the light which streams here, to
illume
This long-explored but still exhaustless mine
Of contemplation ; and the azure gloom
Of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume
Hues which have words, and speak to ye of
heaven,
Floats o'er this vast and wondrous monument,
And shadows forth its glory. There is given
Unto the things of earth, which Time hath bent,
A spirit's feeling, and where he hath leant
His hand, but broke his scythe, there is a power
And magic in the ruined battlement,
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
For which the palace of the present hour
Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its
dower. LORD BYRON.
THE COLISEUM
TYPE of the antique Rome ! Rich reliquary
Of lofty contemplation left to Time
By buried centuries of pomp and power !
At length, at length, after so many days
Of weary pilgrimage and burning thirst
(Thirst for the springs of lore that in thee lie),
I kneel, an altered and an humble man,
Amid thy shadows, and so drink within
My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory !
Vastness, and age, and memories of eld !
Silence, and desolation, and dim night !
I feel ye now, I feel ye in your strength,
O spells more sure than e'er Judaean king
Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane !
O charms more potent than the rapt Chaldee
Ever drew down from out the quiet stars !
Here, where a hero fell, a column falls !
Here, where the mimic eagle glared in gold,
A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat !
Here, where the dames of Rome their gilded hair
Waved to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle !
ROME 03
Here, where on golden throne the monarch lolled,
Glides, spectre-like, unto his marble home,
Lit by the wan light of the horned moon,
The swift and silent lizard of the stones !
But stay ! these walls, these ivy-clad arcades,
These mouldering plinths, these sad and blackened
shafts,
These vague entablatures, this crumbling frieze,
These shattered cornices, this wreck, this ruin,
These stones, alas! these grey stones, are they
all,
All of the famed and the colossal left
By the corrosive hours to fate and me?
"Not all," the echoes answer me, "not all!
Prophetic sounds and loud arise forever
From us and from all ruin unto the wise,
As melody from Memnon to the sun.
We rule the hearts of mightiest men, we rule
With a despotic sway all giant minds.
We are not impotent, we pallid stones.
Not all our power is gone, not all our fame,
Not all the magic of our high renown,
Not all the wonder that encircles us,
Not all the mysteries that in us lie,
Not all the memories that hang upon
And cling around about us as a garment,
Clothing us in a robe of more than glory."
EDGAR ALLAN POE.
204s THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
THE ARCH OF TITUS
I STOOD beneath the Arch of Titus long ;
On Hebrew forms there sculptured long I pored;
Till fancy, by a distant clarion stung,
Woke; and methought there moved that arch
toward
A Roman triumph. Lance and helm and sword
Glittered; white coursers tramped and trumpets
rung:
Last came, car-borne amid a captive throng,
The laurelled son of Rome's imperial lord.
As though by wings of unseen eagles fanned
The Conqueror's cheek, when first that arch he
saw,
Burned with the flush he strove in vain to quell.
Titus ! a loftier arch than thine hath spanned
Rome and the world with empery and law ;
Thereof each stone was hewn from Israel !
AUBREY DE VERB.
THE SHADOW OF THE OBELISK
HOMEWARD turning from the music which had so
entranced my brain,
That the way I scarce remembered to the Pincian
Hill again,
ROME 205
Nay, was willing to forget it underneath a moon
so fair,
In a solitude so sacred, and so summer-like an
air,
Came I to the side of Tiber, hardly conscious
where I stood,
Till I marked the sullen murmur of the venerable
flood.
Rome lay doubly dead around me, sunk in silence
calm and deep:
'T was the death of desolation, and the mighty
one of sleep.
Dreams alone, and recollections, peopled now the
solemn hour,
Such a spot and such a season well might wake
the Fancy's power;
Yet no monumental fragment, storied arch, or
temple vast,
Mid the mean plebeian buildings loudly whispered
of the Past.
Tethered by the shore, some barges hid the wave's
august repose;
Petty sheds of humble merchants nigh the Cam-
pus Martius rose;
Hardly could the dingy Thamis, when his tide is
ebbing low,
Life's dull scene in colder colours to the homesick
exile show.
06 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Winding from the vulgar prospect, through a
labyrinth of lanes,
Forth I stepped upon the Corso where its great-
ness Rome retains.
Yet it was not ancient glory, though the midnight
radiance fell
Soft on many a princely mansion, many a dome's
majestic swell;
Though, from some hushed corner gushing, oft a
modern fountain gleamed,
Where the marble and the waters in their fresh-
ness equal seemed:
What though open courts unfolded columns of
Corinthian mould?
Beautiful it was, but altered ! naught bespake the
Rome of old.
So, regardless of the grandeur, passed I towards
the Northern Gate;
All around were shining gardens, churches glitter-
ing, yet sedate;
Heavenly bright the broad enclosure ! but the o'er-
whelming silence brought
Stillness to mine own heart's beating, with a mo-
ment's truce of thought,
And I started as I found me walking, ere I was
aware,
O'er the Obelisk's tall shadow, on the pavement of
the square.
ROME 207
Ghost-like seemed it to address me, and conveyed
me for a while,
Backward, through a thousand ages, to the bor-
ders of the Nile;
Where, for centuries, every morning saw it creep-
ing long and dun,
O'er the stones perchance of Memphis, or the City
of the Sun.
Kingly turrets looked upon it, pyramids and
sculptured fanes ;
Towers and palaces have mouldered, but the shad-
ow still remains.
Out of that lone tomb of Egypt, o'er the seas the
trophy flew;
Here the eternal apparition met the millions' daily
view.
Virgil's foot has touched it often, it hath kissed
Octavia's face,
Royal chariots have rolled o'er it, in the frenzy of
the race,
When the strong, the swift, the valiant, mid the
thronged arena strove,
In the days of good Augustus and the dynasty of
Jove.
Herds are feeding in the Forum, as in old Evan-
der's time;
Tumbled from the steep Tarpeian all the towers
that sprang sublime.
08 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Strange that what seemed most inconstant should
the most abiding prove;
Strange that what is hourly moving no mutation
can remove:
Ruined lies the cirque ! the chariots, long ago, have
ceased to roll*
Even the Obelisk is broken, but the shadow still
is whole.
What is Fame! if mightiest empires leave so little
mark behind,
How much less must heroes hope for, in the wreck
of humankind!
Less than even this darksome picture, which I
tread beneath my feet,
Copied by a lifeless moonbeam on the pebbles of
the street;
Since, if Caesar's best ambition, living, was to be
renowned,
What shall Caesar leave behind him save the shadow
of a sound?
THOMAS WILLIAM PAESONS.
THE PILLAR OF TRAJAN
WHERE towers are crushed, and unf orbidden weeds
O'er mutilated arches shed their seeds,
And temples, doomed to milder change, unfold
A new magnificence that vies with old,
ROME 209
Firm in its pristine majesty hath stood
A votive column, spared by fire and flood;
And, though the passions of man's fretful race
Have never ceased to eddy round its base,
Not injured more by touch of meddling hands
Than a lone obelisk, mid Nubian sands
Or aught in Syrian deserts left to save
From death the memory of the good and brave.
Historic figures round the shaft embost
Ascend, with lineaments in air not lost :
Still as he turns, the charmed spectator sees
Group winding after group, with dream-like ease;
Triumphs in sun-bright gratitude displayed,
Or softly stealing into modest shade.
So, pleased with purple clusters to entwine
Some lofty elm-tree, mounts the daring vine;
The woodbine so, with spiral grace, and breathes
Wide-spreading odors from her flowery wreaths.
Borne by the Muse from rills in shepherds' ears
Murmuring but one smooth story for all years,
I gladly commune with the mind and heart
Of him who thus survives by classic art,
His actions witness, venerate his mien,
And study Trajan as by Pliny seen;
Behold how fought the chief whose conquering
sword
Stretched far as earth might own a single lord ;
In the delight of mortal prudence schooled,
210 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
How feelingly at home the sovereign ruled ;
Best of the good, in pagan faith allied
To more than man, by virtue deified.
Memorial pillar ! mid the wrecks of time
Preserve thy charge with confidence sublime,
The exultations, pomps, and cares of Rome,
Whence half the breathing world received its
doom:
Things that recoil from language ; that, if shown
By apter pencil, from the light had flown.
A pontiff, Traj an here the gods implores,
There greets an embassy from Indian shores:
Lo ! he harangues his cohorts, there the storm
Of battle meets him in authentic form!
Unharnessed, naked troops of Moorish horse
Sweep to the charge ; more high, the Dacian force,
To hoof and finger mailed ; yet, high or low,
None bleed, and none lie prostrate but the foe ;
In every Roman, through all turns of fate,
Is Roman dignity inviolate;
Spirit in him pre-eminent, who guides,
Supports, adorns, and over all presides;
Distinguished only by inherent state
From honored instruments that round him wait;
Rise as he may, his grandeur scorns the test
Of outward symbol, nor will deign to rest
On aught by which another is deprest.
Alas ! that one thus disciplined could toil
ROME
To enslave whole nations on their native soil;
So emulous of Macedonian fame,
That, when his age was measured with his aim,
He drooped, mid else unclouded victories,
And turned his eagles back with deep-drawn sighs.
O weakness of the great! O folly of the wise!
Where now the haughty empire that was spread
With such fond hope? Her very speech is dead;
Yet glorious Art the power of Time defies,
And Trajan still, through various enterprise,
Mounts, in this fine illusion, toward the skies :
Still are we present with the imperial chief,
Nor cease to gaze upon the bold relief,
Till Rome, to silent marble unconfined,
Becomes with all her years a vision of the mind.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
THE CORSO: THE ROMAN CARNIVAL.
WHO can forget thy Carnival, Rome, thy Carnival
flashing
Joy and life through thy solemn streets ? Ah, sea-
son when Pleasure
Day after day its kaleidoscope turned of bright
robes and bright faces ;
Rain of confetti and snowing of flowers from win-
dow to window;
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Tumult of chatter and laughter, glances of youths
and of maidens,
While their exchanges of flowers and bonbons be-
neath the balconies
Made the heart flutter with dreams of a world too
sweet for possession.
Then the masking, the tricoloured plumes in the
broad black sombrero ;
Blouses and harlequins battling like boys in a snow-
balling frolic;
While the thronged Corso scarce opened a way for
the carriages passing.
Wild was the revelry, counting no hours from
noontide till nightfall ;
Till, as behind the solemn old palaces dropped the
last sunbeam,
Boomed the loud cannon that cleared the carriages
off in an instant.
Then came the cavalry making an opening amid
the thronged faces,
Down from the Piazza del Popolo on to the Palace
Venetian :
Then the mad race of the riderless horses, and
shouts of the people
Ended each many-hued day. Young hearts grew
weary of pleasure.
Tired feet trod upon flowers that lay on the pave-
ment neglected,
ROME 213
And the soiled maskers trailed heavily homeward
their fanciful trappings.
Silent the stars shone down on the narrow streets,
and the watchman
Dozed in his corner and dreamed of the coming
delights of the morrow.
Can I forget the wild masque-ball at the brilliant
Teatro?
Dominoes, white, black, and red, all thronging
and jostling each other:
Men dark-bearded and women in costumes as fair
as Sultanas,
Every one free as the wind, by fashion's conven-
tions untrammelled,
All borne away for the moment, and chasing the
butterfly Pleasure,
Till the stars faded and set in the cold grey light
of the morning.
Then, last of all, like a candle that flares at its
death in the socket,
Burst on the night the bewildering blaze of the
wild Moccoletti,
Flashed in the windows from palace to palace the
swift 'llumination,
Flashed in the street, on foot and in carriage each
man and each woman
Bearing aloft from all reach their torches, with
breath or with flapper
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Striving to keep their own and to put out the
lights of their neighbours,
While Senza Moccolo, Moccolo! all through the
Corso resounded.
Can I forget thee, Rome, at this season of inno-
cent pleasure?
Now when I see how the tyrants have caught thee
and ruffled thy plumage,
Clipped the gay pinions which once every year
thou spreadest in frolic ;
Forced thee to laugh, when the bitterest scorn
should have answered their meddling ;
Forced thee to take thy harp from the willows
and sing at their bidding,
When thou shouldst call down the lightning of
heaven to blast thy oppressors !
Patience! the day hastens onward. Thunder-
clouds on the horizon
Rumble and will not rest. Beneath the thrones a
volcano
Moans, not in vain ; and the hour must come when
the forces electric,
Justice and Freedom and Truth, no longer can
slumber inactive.
Then shall thy children exult in a jubilee holier,
grander,
And thy brief carnival pleasures seem but the
sport of a schoolboy
ROME 215
To the true freedom that then shall crown thee
with blessing and honour !
CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH.
THE SCALINATA
I
IN Rome there is a glorious flight of stone,
Great steps, as leading to a giant's throne,
Or to a temple of Titanic gods ;
This marvellous height, up which the pilgrim plods
Breathless half-way, seems like a stairway tracked
By myriad feet of some wild cataract;
Like those where Nilus, with his flag of spray,
Leads his wild Abyssinian floods away.
Below this giant stairway, in the square,
There springs a cooling murmur in the air ;
The liquid music of a tinkling rill ;
A stolen Naiad from the Sabine hill.
Still singing, in captivity, the lay
Learned on her native mountains far away.
In middle of this fount a marble barge
Sits overflowing with its crystal charge ;
Its light mast liquid silver in the sun ;
Its viewless rowers singing every one
216 THBOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Until, so feigns the fancy, warmly dark,
Great Egypt sails in the fantastic bark ;
Melting in languors of her own heart's heat,
A tame, bright leopard cushioning her feet !
But here, with swelling heart and lordly mien,
The stately swan of Avon swims between.
Crowning the flight, a porphyry column stands
Dark as the sphinx above the desert sands ;
Solemn as prophecy it points the sky,
Propounding its dim riddle to the eye ;
And it has seen, with look as calm as Fate's,
On Nile and Tiber, the imperial states
Rise nobly, and fall basely ; and there still
Waits for new wonders, silent on yon hill.
II
In Rome there is a glorious flight of stone,
Terrace o'er terrace rising, like that shown
To dreaming Jacob, climbing, till on high
The last broad platform nobly gains the sky.
On this great stairway what are these I see?
Ascending and descending ! They should be
Angels with spotless mantles and white wings.
But, look again: those sad, misshapen things,
They scarce seem human ! Where they crawl and
lay
Their tattered misery in the stranger's way,
Filling the air with simulated sighs,
ROME 217
Weeping for bread with imsuffused eyes.
Would they did weep, indeed ! for, stung to tears
Then were there hope where now no hope appears.
But such the melting influence of the place,
That one there was, most abject of his race ;
A whining trunk, deprived of every gift
Save his misfortune ; but with this did lift
Himself to such a height of wealth and power,
That many a Roman noble at this hour
Envies his hoard, and many a sinking name
The beggar's usurious gold still keeps from shame.
Here the brown Sabines, in their gay attires,
Whose eyes still kindle with ancestral fires,
Bring down their mountain graces to the mart,
And wait for bread on the demands of Art.
There Belisarius, with his patriarch hair,
Sits blind and hungry. A Lucretia there
Winds her light distaff. Young Endymion here
Sleeps, as in Latmos. Yonder, drawing near,
The original of many a picture moves,
And many a statue which the world approves.
There sits the mother, with her soft, brown eyes
Bent o'er the face which on her bosom lies ;
Enough of mingled wonder, pride, and trust,
To call the hand of Raphael from the dust.
THOMAS BUCHANAN READ.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
ST. PETER'S
BUT 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 sur-
veyed
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 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 lessened ; but thy mind,
Expanded by the genius of the spot,
ROME
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 marble, 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
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
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.
THE ILLUMINATIONS OF ST. PETER'S
I
FIRST ILLUMINATION
TEMPLE ! where Time has wed Eternity,
How beautiful thou art beyond compare,
Now emptied of thy massive majesty,
And made so faery-frail, so faery-fair :
The lineaments that thou art wont to wear
Augustly traced in ponderous masonry,
Lie faint as in a woof of filmy air,
Within their frames of mellow jewelry.
ROME
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,
So peaceful that it seemed I well could die
Entranced before such beauty, when a cry
Burst from me, and I sunk in dumb amaze:
The molten stars before a withering blaze
Paled to annihilation, and my eye,
Stunned by the splendour, 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,
Cross-topped, thrice girt with flame :
Cities of men,
Queens of the earth ! bow low, was ever brow
Of mortal birth adorned as Rome is now?
LORD HOUGHTON.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
ST. JOHN LATERAN
OF TEMPLES built by mortal hands,
Give honour to the Lateran first;
'T was here the hope of many lands,
The infant Church was nursed;
And grew unto a great estate,
And waxed strong in grace and power,
With Christ for head and faithful mate,
And learning for her dower.
Since first this house to him was raised,
Three times five hundred years have run;
For this let Constantine be praised,
An English mother's son!
He with his own imperial sword
Did dig foundations broad and deep,
That henceforth in his hand the Lord
Rome and her hills should keep.
In after ages, one by one,
Arose the altars vowed to Heaven ;
Each crest is sacred now, but none
Like this of all the Seven !
Behold she stands! The Mother Church!
A queen among her countless peers !
Ah ! open be that sacred porch
For thrice five hundred years!
BESSIE RAYNER PARKES.
ROME
THE PANTHEON
SIMPLE, erect, severe, austere, sublime,
Shrine of all saints, and temple of all gods,
From Jove to Jesus, spared and blest by time ;
Looking tranquillity, while falls or nods
Arch, empire, each thing round thee, and man
plods
His way through thorns to ashes, glorious
dome!
Shalt thou not last? Time's scythe and tyrants'
rods
Shiver upon thee, sanctuary and home
Of art and piety, Pantheon ! pride of Rome !
Relic of nobler days and noblest arts !
Despoiled yet perfect, with thy circle spreads
A holiness appealing to all hearts,
To art a model; and to him who treads
Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds
Her light through thy sole aperture; to those
Who worship, here are altars for their beads ;
And they who feel for genius may repose
Their eyes on honoured forms, whose busts around
them close.
LORD BYRON.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
ARA CGELI.
WHOEVER will go to Rome may see,
In the chapel of the Sacristy
Of Ara-Coeli, the Sainted Child,
Garnished from throat to foot with rings
And brooches and precious offerings,
And its little nose kissed quite away
By dying lips. At Epiphany,
If the holy winter day prove mild,
It is shown to the wondering, gaping crowd
On the church's steps, held high aloft,
While every sinful head is bowed,
And the music plays, and the censer's soft
White breath ascends like silent prayer.
Many a beggar kneeling there,
Tattered and hungry, without a home,
Would not envy the Pope of Rome,
If he, the beggar, had half the care
Bestowed on him that falls to the share
Of yonder Image, for you must know
It has its minions to come and go,
Its perfumed chamber, remote and still,
Its silken couch, and its jewelled throne,
And a special carriage of its own
To take the air in, when it will.
And though it may neither drink nor eat,
By a nod to its ghostly seneschal
ROME 225
It could have the choicest wine and meat.
Often some princess, brown and tall,
Comes, and unclasping from her arm
The glittering bracelet, leaves it, warm
With her throbbing pulse, at the Baby's feet.
Ah, He is loved by high and low,
Adored alike by simple and wise.
The people kneel to Him in the street.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.
THE STEPS OF AHA CCELI
A ladder, realler, dearer
Than that to the patriarch known ;
A stair whose every stone
Leads one to Heaven nearer.
For this divine, aerial
Fabric the architect
Searched Nature to select
The grandest of material.
Marbles, in ancient time
Unrivalled, he took as a token,
Which mattocks blind had broken
Intent on nought but lime.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Which now will never salute us
From the gleaming shrine of the god,
Or from the pavement trod
By the feet of the Gracchi and Brutus.
* * * # *
But in spite of the cavalieros
And the rabble that worship the doll
As at the capitol
Lo ! the mounting shades of the heroes !
SULLY PRUDHOMME.
Tr. Robert Haven Schauffler.
THE VATICAN
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 envenomed 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 light,
ROME
The sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow
All radiant from its 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
Longed for a deathless lover from above,
And maddened in that vision are exprest
All that ideal beauty ever blessed
The mind within its most unearthly mood,
When each conception was a heavenly guest,
A ray of immortality, and stood,
Starlike, around, until they gathered to a god!
And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven
The fire which we endure, it was repaid
By him to whom the energy was given
Which this poetic marble hath arrayed
With an eternal glory, which if made
By human hands, is not of human thought ;
And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor laid
One ringlet in the dust, nor hath it caught
A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which
't was wrought. LORD BYRON.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
EASTER DAY
THE silver trumpets rang across the Dome :
The people knelt upon the ground with awe:
And borne upon the necks of men I saw,
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.
Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam,
And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red,
Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head:
In splendour and in light the Pope passed home.
My heart stole back across wide wastes of years
To One who wandered by a lonely sea,
And sought in vain for any place of rest:
"Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest,
I, only I, must wander wearily,
And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with
tears." OSCAR WILDE.
TWO GRAVES AT ROME
SAINTS and Csesars are here,
Bishops of Rome and the world,
Rulers by love and by fear,
Those who in purple and gold
Pranked and lorded it here ;
Those who in sackcloth and shame
Elected their limbs to enfold,
ROME 229
Scornful of pleasure and fame:
Ah, they had their reward !
There is something else that I seek
On the flowery sward,
By the pile of Cestius here !
Is it but two stones like the rest
Fondly preserving a name
Elsewhere unheeded of fame,
Set here by love, and left
To gather grey, like the rest?
Psha! 'T is the fate of man!
We are wretched, we are bereft
Of all that gave life its plan,
The sunbeam and treasure of yore;
We lay it in earth and are )gone;
Then, as before,
We laugh and forget like the rest.
A transient name on the stone,
A transient love in the 1 heart ;
We have our day and are gone:
But it is not so with these
There is life and love in the stone ;
Names of beauty and light,
Over all lands and seas
They have gone forth in their might ;
Warmer and higher 'beats
The general heart at the words
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Shelley and Keats :
There is life and love in the stone !
He with the gleaming eyes
And glances gentle and wild,
The angel eternal child;
His heart could not throb like ours,
He could not see with our eyes
Dimmed with the dulness of earth,
Blind with the bondage of hours ;
Yet none with diviner mirth
Hailed what was noble and sweet;
The blood-tracked journey of life,
The way-sore feet,
None have watched with more human eyes.
And he who went first to the tomb,
Rejoice, great souls of the dead!
For none in that earlier Rome
Took a bolder and lordlier heart
To the all-receiving tomb:
No richer, more equable eye,
No tongue of more musical art
Conversed with the gods on high,
Among all the minstrels who made
Sweetness 'tween Etna and Alp;
Nor was any laid
With such music and tears in the tomb.
ROME
What seek ye, my comrades at Rome?
To see and be seen at the gay
Meet on the Appian Way,
Or within the tall palace at eve
To dance out your season at Rome?
To muse on the giants of old,
In the Forum at twilight to grieve?
It is more than these ruins enfold !
Warmer and higher beats
The Englishman's heart at the words
Shelley and Keats!
And here is the heart of our Rome.
FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE.
FROM "LOVE IN ITALY"
UNDER the shadow of our pyramid,
Rome's thought of Egypt, dearest, there are hid
Two graves of English poets. I have heard
That no celestial song of love or loss
That Italy gave birth to could outvie
Their rapture whom death gave to Italy.
So here three ages meet : the imperial word
Of nations sunk in night still sounds across
The tide of years, to tell the spirit's life
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Through the poor form's decay. Not otherwise
These verses that I sing to thee are rife
With visions Adam dreamed in Paradise
And hopes that herald in the Eternal Day :
Hearts turn to dust, Love changes not alway.
JOHN HALL INGHAM.
THE GRAVE OF KEATS
RID OF the world's injustice, and hisipain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue :
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery !
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English land !
Thy name was writ in water it shall stand :
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.
OSCAE WILDE.
ROME
THE GRAVE OF KEATS
THE PEOTESTANT CEMETERY AT EOME
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water"
FAIR little city of the pilgrim dead,
Dear are thy marble streets, thy rosy lanes :
Easy it seems and natural here to die,
And death a mother, who with tender care
Doth lay to sleep her ailing little ones.
Old are these graves, and they who, mournfully,
Saw dust to dust return, themselves are mourned ;
Yet, in green cloisters of the cypress shade
Full-choired chants the fearless nightingale
Ancestral songs learned when the world was
young.
Sing on, sing ever in thy breezy homes ;
Toss earthward from the white acacia bloom
The mingled joy of fragrance and of song;
Sing in the pure security of bliss.
These dead concern thee not, nor thee the fear
That is the shadow of our earthly loves.
And me thou canst not comfort ; tender hearts
Inherit here the anguish of the doubt
Writ on this gravestone. He, at least, I trust,
Serenity of sure attainment knows.
The night falls, and the darkened verdure starred
With pallid roses shuts the world away.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Sad wandering souls of song, frail ghosts of
thought
That voiceless died, the massing shadows haunt,
Troubling the heart with unfulfilled delight.
The moon is listening in the vault of heaven,
And, like the airy beat of mighty wings,
The rhythmic throb of stately cadences
Inthralls the ear with some high-measured verse,
Where ecstasies of passion-nurtured words
For great thoughts find a home, and fill the mind
With echoes of divinely purposed hopes
That wore on earth the death-pall of despair.
Night darkens round me. Never more in life
May I, companioned by the friendly dead,
Walk in this sacred fellowship again ;
Therefore, thou silent singer 'neath the grass,
Still sing to me those sweeter songs unsung,
"Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone,"
Caressing thought with wonderments of phrase
Such as thy springtide rapture knew to win.
Ay, sing to me thy unborn summer songs.
And the ripe autumn lays that might have been ;
Strong wine of fruit mature, whose flowers alone
we know.
SILAS WEIR MITCHELL.
ROME 235
THE GRAVE OF SHELLEY
LIKE burnt-out torches by a sick man's bed
Gaunt cypress-trees stand round the sun-
bleached stone;
Here doth the little night-owl make her throne,
And the slight lizard show his jeweled head.
And, where the chaliced poppies flame to red,
In the still chamber of yon pyramid
Surely some old-world Sphinx lurks darkly hid,
Grim warder of this pleasaunce of the dead.
Ah! sweet indeed to rest within the womb
Of Earth, great mother of eternal sleep,
But sweeter far for thee a restless tomb
In the blue cavern of an echoing deep,
Or where the tall ships founder in the gloom
Against the rocks of some wave-shattered steep.
OSCAR WILDE.
PONTE SUBLICIO
BUT, meanwhile axe and lever
Have manfully been plied;
And now the bridge hangs tottering
Above the boiling tide.
236 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
"Come back, come back, Horatius !"
Loud cried the Fathers all ;
"Back, Lartius ! back, Herminius !
Back, ere the ruin fall !"
Back darted Spurius Lartius,
Herminius darted back;
And as they passed beneath their feet
They felt the timbers crack.
But when they turned their faces,
And on the farther shore
Saw brave Horatius stand alone,
They would have crossed once more ;
But with a crash like thunder
Fell every loosened beam,
And like a dam the mighty wreck
Lay right athwart the stream:
And a long shout of triumph
Rose from the walls of Rome,
As to the highest turret-tops
Was splashed the yellow foam.
And like a horse unbroken
When first he feels the rein,
The furious river struggled hard
And tossed his tawny mane,
And burst the curb, and bounded,
Rejoicing to be free;
ROME 237
And whirling down in fierce career
Battlement and plank and pier,
Rushed headlong to the sea.
Alone stood brave Horatius,
But constant still in mind;
Thrice thirty thousand foes before,
And the broad flood behind.
"Down with him !" cried false Sextus,
With a smile on his pale face;
"Now yield thee," cried Lars Porsena,
"Now yield thee to our grace."
Round turned he, as not deigning
Those craven ranks to see;
Naught spake he to Lars Porsena,
To Sextus naught spake he ;
But he saw on Palatinus
The white porch of his home;
And he spake to the noble river
That rolls by the towers of Rome:
"O Tiber! Father Tiber!
To whom the Romans pray,
A Roman's life, a Roman's arms,
Take thou in charge this day !"
So he spake, and, speaking, sheathed
The good sword by his side,
And with his harness on his back
Plunged headlong in the tide.
38 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
No sound of joy or sorrow
Was heard from either bank ;
But friends and foes in dumb surprise,
With parted lips and straining eyes,
Stood gazing where he sank ;
And when above the surges
They saw his crest appear,
All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry,
And even the ranks of Tuscany
Could scarce forbear to cheer.
But fiercely ran the current,
Swollen high by months of rain:
And fast his blood was flowing ;
And he was sore in pain,
And heavy with his armor,
And spent with changing blows ;
And oft they thought him sinking,
But still again he rose.
Never, I ween, did swimmer,
In such an evil case,
Struggle through such a raging flood
Safe to the landing-place :
But his limbs were borne up bravely
By the brave heart within,
And our good Father Tiber
Bare bravely up his chin.
ROME 239
"Curse on him !" quoth false Sextus ;
"Will not the villain drown?
But for this stay, ere close of day
We should have sacked the town !"
"Heaven help him !" quoth Lars Porsena
"And bring him safe to shore ;
For such a gallant feat of arms
Was never seen before."
And now he feels the bottom ;
Now on dry earth he stands ;
Now round him throng the Fathers
-To press his gory hands ;
And now with shouts and clapping,
And noise of weeping loud,
He enters through the river-gate,
Borne by the joyous crowd.
They gave him of the corn-land,
That was a public right,
As much as two strong oxen
Could plough from morn till night;
And they made a molten image,
And set it up on high,
And there it stands unto this day
To witness if I lie.
It stands in the Comitium,
Plain for all folk to see;
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Horatius in his harness,
Halting upon one knee:
And underneath is written,
In letters all of gold,
How valiantly he kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.
TWO IN THE CAMPAGNA
I WONDER do you feel to-day
As I have felt, since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May ?
For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalised me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.
Help me to hold it : first it left
The yellowing fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork's cleft,
Some old tomb's ruin ; yonder weed
Took up the floating weft,
ROME
Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles, blind and green they grope
Among the honey-meal, and last
Everywhere on the grassy slope
I traced it. Hold it fast!
The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air,
Rome's ghost since her decease.
Such life there, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting Nature have her way
While Heaven looks from its towers.
How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven abo.ve.
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?
I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free !
Where does the fault lie? what the core
Of the wound, since wound must be?
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul's springs, your part, my part
In life, for good and ill.
No. I yearn upward touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul's warmth, I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak
Then the good minute goes.
Already how am I so far
Out of that minute ? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?
Just when I seemed about to learn !
Where is the thread now ? Off again !
The old trick ! Only I discern
Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
ROBERT BROWNING.
ROME
THE APPIAN WAY
AWE-STRTJCK I gazed upon that rock-paved way,
The Appian Road; marmorean witness still
Of Rome's resistless stride and fateful will,
Which mocked at limits, opening out for aye
Divergent paths to one imperial sway.
The nations verily their parts fulfil ;
And war must plough the fields which law shall till ;
Therefore Rome triumphed till the appointed day.
Then from the Catacombs, like waves, upburst
The host of God, and scaled, as in an hour,
O'er all the earth the mountain-seats of power.
Gladly in that baptismal flood immersed
The old Empire died to live. Once more on high
It sits ; now clothed with immortality.
AUBREY DE VERB.
AUGUST ON THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA
SOME sparkling morn before the August rays
Have touched their fierce extreme of midday heat,
From Albaii hills descend the white-paved street
Trending to Rome, into the plain ablaze
With withering beams. Then backward turn thy
gaze
Upon the fair-limned hazy heights, and meet
The flood of opalescence from a sweet,
844 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Young sky, that laves far crests, and nearer plays
Around the yellow-flowering weeds and grass,
Tinctured burnt-red, and brittle thistles brown,
Sere as the blasted empire's awful might
Engulfed in that vast, arid, arch-spanned down,
Where blood-fed poppies bloom upon a mass
Of woe yet gorgeous in the morning light !
FREDERIC CROWNINSHIELD.
THE CAMPAGNA SEEN FROM ST. JOHN
LATERAN
WAS IT the trampling of triumphant hosts
That levelled thus yon plain, sea-like and hoary;
Armies from Rome sent forth to -distant coasts,
Or back returning clad with spoils of glory?
Around it loom cape, ridge, and promontory :
Above it sunset shadows fleet like ghosts,
Fast-borne o'er keep and tomb, whose ancient
boasts,
By Time confuted, name have none in story.
Fit seat for Rome ! for here is ample space,
Which greatness chiefly needs, severed alone
By yonder aqueducts, with queenly grace
That sweep in curves concentric ever on
(Bridging a world subjected as a chart),
To that great city, head of earth, and heart.
AUBREY DE VERB.
ROME 245
THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA
How GENTLE here is Nature's mood. She lays
A woman-hand upon the troubled heart,
Bidding the world away and time depart,
While the brief minutes swoon to endless days
Filled full of sad, inconstant thoughtfulness.
Behold 'tis eventide. Dun cattle stand
Drowsed in the misted grasses. From 'the hol-
lows deep,
Dim veils, adrift, o'er arch and tower sweep,
Casting a dreary doubt along the land,
Weighting the twilight with some vague distress.
Transient and subtle, not to thought more near
Than spirit is to flesh, about me rise
Dim memories, long lost to love's sad eyes ;
Now are they wandering shadows, strange and
drear,
That from their natal substance far have strayed.
The witches of the mind possess the time,
And cry, "Behold thy dead !" They come, they
pass;
We yearn to give them feature, face. Alas !
Love hath no morn for memory's failing prime;
What once was sweet with truth is but a shade.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
The ghosts of nameless sorrow, joy, despair,
Emotions that have no remembered source,
Love-waifs from other worlds, hope, fear, re-
morse
Born of some vision's crime, wail through the air,
Crying, "We were and are not," that is all.
Yet sweet the indecisive evening hour
That hath of earth the least. Unreal as dreams
Dreamed within dreams, and ever further, seems
The sound of human toil, while grass and flower
Bend where the mercy of the dew doth fall.
Strange mysteries of expectation wait
Above the grave-mounds of the storied space,
Where, buried, lie a nation's strength and grace,
And the sad j oys of Rome's imperious state
That perished of its insolent excess.
A dull, grey shroud o'er this vast burial rests,
Is deathly still, or seems to rise and fall,
As on a dear one, dead, the moveless pall
Doth cheat the heart with stir of her white breasts,
Mocking the troubled hour with worse distress.
A deathful languor holds the twilight mist,
Unearthly colours drape the Alban hills,
A dull malaria the spirit fills;
Death and decay all beauty here have kissed,
Pledging the land to sorrowing loveliness.
SILAS WEIE MITCHELL.
ROME 247
SUNSET ON THE CAMPAGNA
THE pines have no voice this ineffable hour,
The sea and the Dome shine through wavering
gold;
Here, where stood temple and palace and tower,
Shadows and grass lie in fold over fold,
Hiding meek hearts that were masterful, living ;
Hiding mute lips that were loud with complaint ;
Mother of all, is it scorn or forgiving
That covers so tenderly sinner and saint?
Mountains keep watch like strong angels of pity;
Mist on the plain lies more light than a kiss ;
Eyes that were dust before Rome was a city,
Eyes that love brightened, saw these, yet not
this.
Not the same wonder, not the same glory,
Other, not lovelier, sunset and morn;
Neither can thought find an end to the story
Of youth for whose rapture the world is new-
born.
HELEN J. SANBOEN.
THE RIVER TIBER
THE TIBER
THE sea was flushing in the morning's rays,
And from the ethereal heights Aurora's car
With rose and saffron gleamed ; when suddenly
The winds were stilled, and every breath of air,
And the oars struggled through the sluggish sea.
And here JEneas from the deep descries
A spacious grove. Through this the Tiber pours
His smiling waves along, with rapid whirls,
And yellow sand, and bursts into the sea.
And all around and overhead were birds
Of various hues, accustomed to the banks
And river-bed; from tree to tree they flew,
Soothing the air with songs. Then to the land
He bids the crews direct the vessels' prows,
And joyfully the shadowy river gains.
* # #
All through that night the Tiber calmed his flood,
And, ebbing backward, stood with tranquil waves,
Smoothing its surface like a placid lake,
That without struggling oars the ships might
glide.
So on their way they speed with joyous shouts.
248
THE RIVER TIBER 249
Along the waters slip the well-tarred keels ;
The waves with wonder gaze, and from afar
The woods, unused to such a sight, admire
Upon the stream the heroes' glittering shields
And painted vessels. Night and day their oars
They ply, pass the long bending river's curves ;
And through green shades of overhanging trees
They pierce, along the tranquil waters borne.
The fiery sun had reached his noonday height,
When from afar they see a citadel,
And walls, and scattered houses here and there ;
Which now Rome matches with the skies, but then
Evander's small and humble town. Then swift
They turn their prows, and near the city's walls.
VIRGIL.
Tr. C. P. Cranch.
THE RIVER TIBER
TIBER is beautiful, too, and the orchard slopes,
and the Anio
Falling, falling, yet, to the ancient lyrical
cadence ;
Tiber and Anio's tide; and cool from Lucretilis
ever,
With the Digentian stream, and with the Bandu-
sian fountain,
250 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Folded in Sabine recesses, the valley and villa of
Horace :
So not seeing I sung; so seeing and listening
say I,
Here, as I sit by the stream, as I gaze at the cell
of the Sibyl,
Here with Albunea's home and the grove of Ti-
burnus beside me;
Tivoli beautiful is, and musical, O Teverone,
Dashing from mountain to plain, thy parted im-
petuous waters !
Tivoli's waters and rocks; and fair under Monte
Gennaro
(Haunt even yet, I must think, as I wander and
gaze, of the shadows,
Faded and pale, yet immortal, of Faunus, the
Nymphs, and the Graces),
Fair in itself, and yet fairer with human complet-
ing creations,
Folded in Sabine recesses the valley and villa of
Horace :
So not seeing I sung ; so now, nor seeing nor hear-
ing,
Neither by waterfall lulled, nor folded in sylvan
embraces,
Neither by cell of the Sibyl, nor stepping the
Monte Gennaro,
Seated on Anio's bank, nor sipping Bandusian
waters,
THE RIVER TIBER 251
But on Montorio's height, looking down on the
tile-clad streets, the
Cupolas, crosses, and domes, the bushes and
kitchen-gardens,
Which, by the grace of the Tiber, proclaim them-
selves Rome of the Romans.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
THE ALBAN HILLS
MONTE CAVO
HAIL! king of beech-trees on this mountain-crest
Raising aloft thy rugged bole and thick,
And, like a many-branching candlestick,
Reaching thy gracious arms above the rest.
The young trees murmur and gleam in the sun
and toss,
Breeze-fondled. Vibrant harmony they sing,
Stung with desire, and every fibrous thing
Takes, in the sun and the wind, a rarer gloss.
The undulating lines of the foothills join
The little towns vivaciously together,
Saluting each by each, and from the nether
Soft-sliding shadows seek a vantage-coign.
Good-morrow Frascati! whose buoyant, teeming
air
Is impregnate with young creativeness.
When the good Autumn comes your peasants
press
Grand liquor from your vineyards everywhere.
252
THE ALBAN HILLS 253
Good-morrow Rocca di Papa, high, so high,
You cling upon your crag precipitous
Like flocks of mountain goats the impetuous
Assault of wolves has come to terrify.
Good-morrow Marino! and Castel Gandolfo,
good-day !
Who offer your lips for the hearty breeze to kiss,
Respecting your ancient, rustic beauty this
That holds in crescent-wise arms the emerald bay.
Behold Albano, Genzano, and, near the tall bridge,
Arriccia, comrade of Nemi, which ruled the towns
neighbouring
What time the feudal Orsini, mightily laboring,
Piled them a massive stronghold high on the ridge.
Closed in the whorls of the hills as in whorls of a
shell,
There the sad waves of the two lakes curl ever-
more,
Mournfully washing on desolate reaches of shore
Rich on a time with forests no iron dared fell.
Wide the campagna extends, in silence furled
In silence profound and in its potent peace;
And far beyond the pallid fields one sees
The sacred place that once contained the world.
Lies the City, wrapped in a vaporous shroud,
Like to a person by deep sleep oppressed.
THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Never an echo carries to this crest
Aught of the mighty clangor of its crowd.
Here it is sweet to lie and quite forget
All of the tumults and annoys of life.
J^ll of the tumult here, the murmurous strife
Of young leaves that upon the green twigs fret.
By every plant that sheds a murmur dim
Upon the air, by every nimble stem,
By every stone and tree, by all of them
Is raised a solemn, an imperious hymn:
"I hymn the candid praises of eternal
Life which is in the flame and in the spring,
In insect, ocean, planet everything,
In the rude clod and in the Judge supernal.
"Of Life which knows to whizz and hum and boom.
Eternally it murders and creates.
In action and in thought it radiates ;
And glows within the cradle an$ the tomb."
Stretch over me, O beech, thy mighty arms,
Who viewest from thine height the plains and
skies.
This hour is mine, though countless unborn eyes
Shall know in coming centuries thy charms.
GIOSUE CAEDUCCI.
TV. Robert Haven Schauffler.
THE ALBAN HILLS 255
SPRING AMONG THE ALBAN HILLS
"Silent with expectation." Shelley.
O'ER the Campagna it is dim warm weather,
The Spring comes with a full heart silently
And many thoughts, a faint flash of the sea
Divides two mists; straight falls the falling
feather.
With wild Spring meanings hill and plain together
Grow pale, or just flush with a dust of flowers.
Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers,
Floats in the midst, a little cloud at tether.
I fain would put my hands about thy face,
Thou with thy thoughts, who art another
Spring,
And draw thee to me like a mournful child.
Thou lookest on me from another place;
I touch not this day's secret, nor the thing
That in thy silence makes thy sweet eyes wild.
ALICE MEYNELL.
FRASCATI
AT THE VILLA CONTI
WHAT peace and quiet in this villa sleep !
Here let us pause, nor chase for pleasure on;
Nothing can be more exquisite than this,
Work, for the nonce farewell, this day we'll give
To fallow joys of perfect idleness.
See how the old house lifts its face of light
Against the pallid olives that behind
Throng up the hill. Look down this vista's shade
Of dark square shaven ilexes, where spurts
The fountain's thin white thread, and blows away.
And mark ! along the terraced balustrade
Two contadine stopping in the shade,
With copper vases poised upon their heads,
How their red j ackets tell against the green !
Old, all is old, what charm there is in age !
Do you believe this villa when 't was new
Was half so beautiful as now it seems?
Look at these balustrades of travertine,
Had they the charm when fresh and sharply
carved
256
FEASCATI 257
As now that they are stained and greyed with
time
And mossed with lichens, every grim old mask
That grins upon their pillars bearded o'er
With waving sprays of slender maiden-hair?
Ah no ! I cannot think it. Things of art
Snatch nature's graces from the hand of Time.
Here will we sit and let the sleeping moon
Doze on and dream into the afternoon,
While all the mountains shake in opal light,
Forever shifting, till the sun's last glance
Transfigures with its splendour all our world.
WILLIAM WETMORE STORY.
A VISIT TO TUSCULUM
A SOLEMN thing it is, and full of awe,
Wandering long time among the lonely hills,
To issue on a sudden mid the wrecks
Of some fallen city, as might seem a coast
From which the tide of life has ebbed away,
Leaving bare sea-marks only. Such there lie
Among the Alban mountains, Tusculum,
Or Palestrina with Cyclopean walls
Enormous: and this solemn awe we felt
And knew this morning, when we stood among
What of the first-named city yet survives.
258 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
For we had wandered long among those hills,
Watching the white goats on precipitous heights,
Half hid among the bushes, or their young
Tending new-yeaned: and we had paused to hear
The deep-toned music of the convent bells,
And wound through many a verdant forest-path,
Gathering the crocus and anemone,
With that fresh gladness which, when flowers are
new
In the first spring, they bring us, till at last
We issued out upon an eminence,
Commanding prospect large on every side,
But largest where the world's great city lay,
Whose features, undistinguishable now,
Allowed no recognition, save where the eye
Could mark the white front of the Lateran
Facing this way, or rested on the dome,
The broad stupendous dome, high over all.
And as a sea around an island's roots
Spreads, so the level champaign every way
Stretched round the city, level all, and green
With the new vegetation of the spring;
Nor by the summer ardours scorched as yet,
Which shot from southern suns, too soon dry up
The beauty and the freshness of the plains ;
While to the right the ridge of Apennine,
Its higher farther summits all snow-crowned,
Rose, with white clouds above them, as might seem
Another range of more aerial hills.
FRASCATI 259
These things were at a distance, but more near
And at our feet signs of the tide of life,
That once was here, and now had ebbed away,
Pavements entire, without one stone displaced,
Where yet there had not rolled a chariot-wheel
For many hundred years ; rich cornices,
Elaborate friezes of rare workmanship,
And broken shafts of columns, that along
This highway-side lay prone; vaults that were
rooms,
And hollowed from the turf, and cased in stone,
Seats and gradations of a theater,
Which emptied of its population now
Shall never be refilled : and all these things,
Memorials of the busy life of man,
Or of his ample means for pomp and pride,
Scattered among the solitary hills,
And lying open to the sun and showers,
And only visited at intervals
By wandering herds, or pilgrims like ourselves
From distant lands ; with now no signs of life,
Save where the goldfinch built his shallow nest
Mid the low bushes, or where timidly
The rapid lizard glanced between the stones,
All saying that the fashion of this world
Passes away ; that not philosophy
Nor eloquence can guard their dearest haunts
From the rude touch of desecrating time.
What marvel, when the very fanes of God,
260 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
The outward temples of the Holy One,
Claim no exemption from the general doom,
But lie in ruinous heaps ; when nothing stands,
Nor may endure to the end, except alone
The spiritual temple built with living stones?
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH.
TO THE FOUNTAIN AT FRASCATI
NOT by Aldobrandini's watery show,
Still plashing at his portal never dumb,
Minished of my devotion, shalt thou come,
Leaving thy natural fount on Algido,
Wild winged daughter of the Sabine snow ;
Now creeping under quiet Tusculum;
Now gushing from those caverns old and
numb ;
Dull were his heart who gazed upon thee so.
Emblem thou art of Time, memorial stream,
Which in ten thousand fancies, being here,
We waste, or use, or fashion, as we deem ;
But if its backward voice comes ever near,
As thine upon the hill, how doth it seem
Solemn and stern, sepulchral and severe !
LORD HANMER.
CIVITA LAVINIA(LANUVIUM)
AT LANUVIUM
"Festo quid potius die
Neptuni faciam."
Horace, Odes, iii-8.
SPRING grew to perfect summer in one day,
And we lay there among the vines, to gaze
Where Circe's isle floats purple far away
Above the golden haze:
And on our ears there seemed to rise and fall
The burden of an old world song we knew,
That sang, "To-day is Neptune's festival,
And we, what shall we do?"
Go down, brown-armed Campagna maid of mine,
And bring again the earthen jar that lies
With three years' dust above the mellow wine ;
And while the swift day dies,
You first shall sing a song of waters blue,
Paphos and Cnidos in the summer seas,
And one who guides her swan-drawn chariot
through
The white-shored Cyclades;
261
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And I will take the second turn of song,
Of floating tresses in the foam and surge
Where Nereid maids about the sea-god throng ;
And night shall have her dirge.
RENNELL RODD.
LAKE NEMI
THE MIRROR OF DIANA
(Popular Name for Lake Nemi)
SHE floats into the quiet skies,
Where, in the circle of the hills,
Her immemorial mirror fills
With light, as of a Virgin's eyes
When, love a-tremble in their blue,
They glow twin violets dipped in dew.
Mild as a metaphor of Sleep,
Immaculately maiden-white,
The Queen Moon of ancestral night
Beholds her image in the deep:
As if a-gaze she beams above
Lake Nemi's magic glass of love.
White rose, white lily of the vale,
Perfume the even breath of night ;
In many a burst of sweet delight
The love throb of the nightingale
Swells through lush flowering woods and fills
The circle of the listening hills,
263
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
White rose, white lily of the skies,
The Moon-flower blossoms in the lake;
The nightingale for her fair sake
With hopeless love's impassioned cries
Seems fain to sing till song must kill
Himself with one tumultuous trill.
And all the songs and all the scents,
The light of glow-worms and the fires
Of fire-flies in the cypress spires ;
And all the wild wind instruments
Of pine and ilex as the breeze
Sweeps out their mystic harmonies ;-
All are but Messengers of May
To that white orb of maiden fire
Who fills the moth with mad desire
To die enamoured in her ray,
And turns each dewdrop in the grass
nto a fairy looking-glass.
O Beauty, far and far above
The night moth and the nightingale !
Far, far above life's narrow pale,
O Unattainable! O Love!
Even as the nightingale we cry
For some Ideal set on high.
LAKE NEMI 265
Haunting the deep reflective mind,
You may surprise its perfect Sphere
Glassed like the Moon within her mere,
Who at a puff of alien wind
Melts in innumerable rings,
Elusive in the flux of things.
MATHILDE BLIND.
TIVOLI
TIVOLI
AND where breathes Nature deeper oracles
Than in thy depths, romantic Tivoli !
Here, where the spirit of past ages dwells,
Lulled by the waters' voice of prophecy,
Endiademed with craggy majesty,
And plumed with woods that shed a horror
round?
From the deep olive grove lift up thine eye ;
Lo, on yon airy cliff's extremest bound
The Sibyl's temple reared against the blue pro-
found ;
Where the wrecked image of the beautiful,
Conscious of faded hues and felt decline,
Looks down on eloquence that doth o'errule
The heart far more than language, though di-
vine
Were he who spake ; full swells the flowing line
Of light and delicate proportion there;
Time's grey tints mellowing that ruined shrine,
Impart a speaking sadness to its air,
A venerable grace that doth his wrongs repair.
JOHN EDMUND READE.
TIVOLI 267
RED POPPIES
IN THE SABINE VALLEYS NEAR ROME
THROUGH the seeding grass,
And the tall corn.
The wind goes:
With nimble feet,
And blithe voice,
Calling, calling,
The wind goes
Through the seeding grass
And the tall corn.
What calleth the wind,
Passing by
The shepherd-wind?
Far and near
He laugheth low,
And the red poppies
Lift their heads
And toss i' the sun.
A thousand thousand blooms
Tossed i' the air,
Banners of joy,
For 't is the shepherd-wind
Passing by,
Singing and laughing low
Through the seeding grass
And the tall corn.
WILLIAM SHARP.
#68 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
THE VILLA OF HADRIAN
"Animula, vagula, blandula."
THE golden glory of an autumn sun
Sheds its full radiance on the mountain tops;
While, save the birds' bright singing in the
copse,
No murmur breaks the midday hush, not one.
I dream among vast columns, overspun
With cobwebs, walls from which the ivy drops
In gleaming clusters, roofs whose mighty props
Are tottering, halls whose grandeur is undone.
And thou, whose curious spirit planned this whole,
To make thine eve epitomise thy noon,
Whose restlessness, forced here to find its goal,
Lay brooding on the hour that comes too
soon,
Flits now thy timid, frail, unquiet soul
Beyond the orbed wanderings of the moon?
GAMALIEL BRADFORD, Jr.
LICENZA
THE SABINE FARM
I OFTEN wished I had a farm,
A decent dwelling snug and warm,
A garden, and a spring as pure
As crystal running by my door,
Besides a little ancient grove,
Where at my leisure I might rove.
The gracious gods, to crown my bliss,
Have granted this, and more than this ;
I have enough in my possessing;
'T is well: I ask no greater blessing,
O Hermes! than remote from strife
To have and hold them for my life.
If I was never known to raise
My fortune by dishonest ways,
Nor, like the spendthrifts of the times,
Shall ever sink it by my crimes :
If thus I neither pray nor ponder,
O, might I have that angle yonder,
Which disproportions now my field,
What satisfaction it would yield!
O that some lucky chance but threw
270 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
A pot of silver in my view,
As lately to the man, who bought
The very land in whioh he wrought!
If I am pleased with my condition,
O, hear, and grant this last petition:
Indulgent, let my cattle batten,
Let all things, but my fancy, fatten,
And thou continue still to guard,
As thou art wont, thy suppliant bard.
Whenever, therefore, I retreat
From Rome into my Sabine seat,
By mountains fenced on either side,
And in my castle fortified,
What can I write with greater pleasure,
Than satires in familiar measure?
Nor mad ambition there destroys,
Nor sickly wind my health annoys ;
Nor noxious autumn gives me pain,
The ruthless undertaker's gain.
* * #
Thus, in this giddy, busy maze
I lose the sunshine of my days,
And oft, with fervent wish repeat,
"When shall I see my sweet retreat?
O, when with books of sages deep,
Sequestered ease, and gentle sleep,
In sweet oblivion, blissful balm !
The busy cares of life becalm?
O, when shall I enrich my veins,
LlCENZA 71
Spite of Pythagoras, with beans ?
Or live luxurious in my cottage,
On bacon ham and savory pottage?
O joyous nights! delicious feasts!
At which the gods might be my guests."
My friends and I regaled, my slaves
Enjoy what their rich master leaves.
There every guest may drink and fill
As much or little as he will,
Exempted from the bedlam-rules
Of roaring prodigals and fools :
Whether, in merry mood or whim,
He fills his bumper to the brim,
Or, better pleased to let it pass,
Grows mellow with a moderate glass.
Nor this man's house, nor that's estate,
Becomes the subject of debate;
Nor whether Lepos, the buffoon,
Can dance, or not, a rigadoon ;
But what concerns us more, I trow,
And were a scandal not to know :
Whether our bliss consist in store
Of riches, or in virtue's lore ;
Whether esteem, or private ends,
Should guide us in the choice of friends ;
Or, what, if rightly understood,
Man's real bliss, and sovereign good.
HORACE.
Tr. Philip Francis.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
"O FONS BANDUSLE"
O babbling Spring, than glass more clear,
Worthy of wreath and cup sincere,
To-morrow shall a kid be thine
With swelled and sprouting brows for sign,-
Sure sign ! of loves and battles near.
Child of the race that butt and rear !
Not less, alas ! his life blood dear
Must tinge thy cold wave crystalline,
O babbling Spring!
Thee Sirius knows not. Thou dost cheer
With pleasant cool the plough-worn steer,
The wandering flock. This verse of mine
Will rank thee one with founts divine ;
Men shall thy rock and tree revere,
O babbling Spring!
HOEACE.
Tr. Austin Dobson.
OSTIA
OSTIA
THE sea was flushing in the morning's rays,
And from the ethereal heights Aurora's car
With rose and saffron gleamed ; when suddenly
The winds were stilled, and every breath of air,
And the oars struggled through the sluggish sea.
And here JEneas from the deep descries
A spacious grove. Through this the Tiber pours
His smiling waves along, with rapid whirls,
And yellow sand, and bursts into the sea.
And all around and overhead were birds
Of various hues, accustomed to the banks
And river-bed ; from tree to tree they flew,
Soothing the air with songs. Then to the land
He bids the crews direct the vessel's prows,
And joyfully the shadowy river gains.
VIRGIL.
Tr. C. P. Cranch.
AT TIBER MOUTH
THE low plains stretch to the west with a glim-
mer of rustling weeds,
Where the waves of a golden river wind home by
the marshy meads ;
273
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And the strong wind born of the sea grows faint
with a sickly breath,
As it stays in the fretting rushes and blows on the
dews of death.
We came to the silent city, in the glare of the
noontide heat,
When the sound of a whisper rang through the
length of the lonely street ;
No tree in the clefted ruin, no echo of song nor
sound,
But the dust of a world forgotten lay under the
barren ground.
There are shrines under these green hillocks to the
beautiful gods that sleep
Where they prayed in the stormy season for lives
gone out on the deep ;
And here in the grave street sculptured, old record
of loves and tears,
By the dust of the nameless slave, forgotten a
thousand years.
Not ever again at even shall ship sail in on the
breeze,
Where the hulls of their gilded galleys came home
from a hundred seas,
For the marsh plants grow in her haven, the marsh
birds breed in her bay,
And a mile to the shoreless westward the water has
passed away.
OSTIA 275
But the sea-folk gathering rushes come up from
the windy shore,
So the song that the years have silenced grows
musical there once more;
And now and again unburied, like some still voice
from the dead,
They light on the fallen shoulder and the lines
of a marble head.
But we went from the sorrowful city and wan-
dered away at will,
And thought of the breathing marble and the
words that are music still.
How full were their lives that laboured, in their
fetterless strength and far
From the ways that our feet have chosen as the
sunlight is from the star,
They clung to the chance and promise that once
while the years are free
Look over our life's horizon as the sun looks over
the sea,
But we wait for a day that dawns not, and cry for
unclouded skies,
And while we are deep in dreaming the light that
was o'er us dies ;
We know not what of the present we shall stretch
out our hand to save
Who sing of the life we long for, and not of the
life we have;
276 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And yet if the chance were with us to gather the
days misspent,
Should we change the old resting-places, the wan-
dering ways we went?
They were strong, but the years are stronger;
they are grown but a name that thrills,
And the wreck of their marble glory lies ghost-
like over their hills.
So a shadow fell o'er our dreaming for the weary
heart of the past,
For the seed that the years have scattered, to reap
so little at last,
And we went to the sea-shore forest, through a
long colonnade of pines,
Where the skies peep in and the sea, with a flit-
ting of silver lines.
And we came on an open place in the green deep
heart of the wood
Where I think in the years forgotten an altar of
Faunus stood;
From a spring in the long dark grasses two rivu-
lets rise and run
By the length of their sandy borders where the
snake lies coiled in the sun.
And the stars of the white narcissus lie over the
grass like snow,
And beyond in the shadowy places the crimson
cyclamens grow ;
OSTIA 277
Far up from their wave home yonder the sea-winds
murmuring pass,
The branches quiver and creak and the lizard
starts in the grass.
And we lay in the untrod moss and pillowed our
cheeks with flowers,
While the sun went over our heads, and we took no
count of the hours;
From the end of the waving branches and under
the cloudless blue
Like sunbeams chained for a banner the thread-
like gossamers flew.
And the joy of the woods came -o'er us, and we felt
that our world was young
With the gladness of years unspent and the sor-
row of life unsung.
So we passed with a sound of singing along to the
seaward way,
Where the sails of the fishermen folk came home-
ward over the bay ;
For a cloud grew over the forest and darkened
the sea-god's shrine,
And the hills of the silent city were only a ruby
line.
But the sun stood still on the waves as we passed
from the fading shores,
And shone on our boat's red bulwarks and the
golden blades of the oars,
278 THROUGH ITALY .WITH THE POETS
And it seemed as we steered for the sunset that we
passed through a twilight sea,
From the gloom of a world forgotten to the light
of a world to be.
RENNELL RODD.
MONTE CASSINO
MONTE CASSINO
BEAUTIFUL valley! through whose verdant meads
Unheard the Garigliano glides along;
The Liris, nurse of rushes and of reeds,
The river taciturn of classic song.
The Land of Labour and the Land of Rest,
Where mediaeval towns are white on all
The hillsides, and where every mountain's crest
Is an Etrurian or a Roman wall.
There is Alagna, where Pope Boniface
Was dragged with contumely from his throne;
Sciarra Colonna, was that day's disgrace
The Pontiff's only, or in part thine own?
There is Ceprano, where a renegade
Was each Apulian, as great Dante saith,
When Manfred by his men-at-arms betrayed
Spurred on to Benevento and to death.
There is Aquinum, the old Volscian town,
Where Juvenal was born, whose lurid light
Still hovers o'er his birthplace like the crown
Of splendour seen o'er cities in the night.
279
280 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Doubled the splendour is, that in its streets
The Angelic Doctor as a school-boy played,
And dreamed perhaps the dreams, that he repeats
In ponderous folios for scholastics made.
And there, uplifted, like a passing cloud
That pauses on a mountain summit high,
Monte Cassino's convent rears its proud
And venerable walls against the sky.
Well I remember how on foot I climbed
The stony pathway leading to its gate ;
Above, the convent bells for vespers chimed,
Below, the darkening town grew desolate.
Well I remember the low arch and dark,
The courtyard with its well, the terrace wide,
From which far down the valley, like a park
Veiled in the evening mists, was dim descried.
The day was dying, and with feeble hands
Caressed the mountains-tops; the vales between
Darkened; the river in the meadow-lands
Sheathed itself as a sword, and was not seen.
The silence of the place was like a sleep,
So full of rest it seemed ; each passing tread
Was a reverberation from the deep
Recesses of the ages that are dead.
MONTE CASSINO 281
For, more than thirteen centuries ago,
Benedict fleeing from the gates of Rome,
A youth disgusted with its vice and woe,
Sought in these mountain solitudes a home.
He founded here his Convent and his Rule
Of prayer and work, and counted work as
prayer ;
The pen became a clarion, and his school
Flamed like a beacon in the midnight air.
What though Boccaccio, in his reckless way,
Mocking the lazy brotherhood, deplores
The illuminated manuscripts, that lay
Torn and neglected on the dusty floors?
Boccaccio was a novelist, a child
Of fancy and of fiction at the best !
This the urbane librarian said, and smiled
Incredulous, as at some idle jest.
Upon such themes as these, with one young friar
I sat conversing late into the night,
Till in its cavernous chimney the wood-fire
Had burnt its heart out like an anchorite.
And then translated, in my convent cell,
Myself yet not myself, in dreams I lay;
And, as a monk who hears the matin bell,
Started from sleep; already it was day.
82 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
From the high window I beheld the scene
On which Saint Benedict so oft had gazed,
The mountains and the valley in the sheen
Of the bright sun, and stood as one amazed.
Gray mists were rolling, rising, vanishing;
The woodlands glistened with their jewelled
crowns ;
Far off the mellow bells began to ring
For matins in the half-awakened towns.
The conflict of the Present and the Past,
The ideal and tke actual in our life,
As on a field of battle held me fast,
While this world and the next world were at
strife.
For, as the valley from its sleep awoke,
I saw the iron horses of the steam
Toss to the morning air their plumes of smoke,
And woke, as one awaketh from a dream.
HENRY WADSWOBTH LONGFELLOW.
CAPUA
CAPUA
Capua was supposed to take its name from be-
ing the caput, or head city> of the southern Etrus-
can confederacy.
FIRST of old of Oscan towns !
Prize of triumphs, pearl of crowns ;
Half a thousand years have fled,
Since arose thy royal head,
Splendour of the Lucumoes.
Tuscan fortress, doomed to feel
Sharpest edge of Samnite steel,
Flashing down the Liris tide ;
Re-arisen, in richer pride,
Cynosure of Italy!
Let the Gaurian echoes say
How, with Rome, we ruled the fray ;
Till the fatal field was won
By the chief who slew his son,
'Neath the vines of Vesulus.
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THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Siren city, where the plain
Glitters twice with golden grain,
Twice the bowers of roses blow,
Twice the grapes and olives flow,
Thou wilt chain the conqueror;
Home of war-subduing eyes,
Shining under softest skies,
Gleaming to the silver sea,
Liber, Venus, strive for thee,
Empress of Ausonia !
Glorious in thy martial bloom,
Glorious still in storm and gloom,
We thy chiefs who dare to die
Raise again thy battle-cry,
Charge with Capuan chivalry !
JOHN NICHOL.
NAPLES
ODE TO NAPLES
I
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
glowed
The isle-sustaining Ocean flood,
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 to move and grow
Because the crystal silence of the air
285
86 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Weighed on their life ; even as the power divine,
Which then lulled all things, brooded upon mine.
II
Then gentle winds arose,
With many a mingled close
Of wild JEolian sound and mountain odour keen;
And where the Baian ocean
Welters with air-like motion,
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
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 Aornus darkened o'er the helm
The horizontal ether ; heaven stript bare
Its depths over Elysium, where the prow
Made the invisible water white as snow ;
From that Typhaen mount, Inarime,
There streamed a sunlit vapour, like the standard
Of some ethereal host ;
Whilst from all the coast,
NAPLES 87
Louder and louder, gathering round, there wan-
dered
Over the oracular woods and divine sea
Prophesyings which grew articulate.
They seize me, I must speak them; be they
fate!
Ill
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 !
IV
Great Spirit, deepest Love !
Which rulest and dost move
All things which live and are, within the Italian
shore ;
288 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Who spreadest heaven around it,
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 harmonising 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 leop-
ards,
And frowns and fears from thee,
Would not more swiftly flee,
Than Celtic wolves from the Ausoni an shepherds.
Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine
Thou yieldest or withholdest, O, let be
This city of thy worship, ever free!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
NAPLES 289
STANZAS
WRITTEN IN DEJECTION NEAR NAPLES
THE sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might;
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its uriexpanded buds ;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The city's voice itself is soft like solitude's.
I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple sea-weeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown;
I sit upon the sands alone,
The lightning of the noontide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet ! did any heart now share in my emotion.
Alas ! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth,
The sage in meditation found,
290 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And walked with inward glory crowned,
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround ;
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure ;
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are ;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.
Some might lament that I were cold,
As I when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan ;
They might lament, for I am one
Whom men love not, and yet regret,
Unlike this day, which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory
yet.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
NAPLES
PALM SUNDAY: NAPLES
BECAUSE it is the day of Palms,
Carry a palm for me,
Carry a palm in Santa Chiara,
And I will watch the sea ;
There are no palms in Santa Chiara
To-day or any day for me.
I sit and watch the little sail
Lean side-ways on the sea,
The sea is blue from here to Sorrento
And the sea-wind comes to me,
And I see the white clouds lift from Sorrento
And the dark sail lean upon the sea.
I have grown tired of all these things,
And what is left for me?
I have no place in Santa Chiara,
There is no peace upon the sea;
But carry a palm in Santa Chiara,
Carry a palm for me.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
A NIGHT IN NAPLES
THIS is the one night in all the year
When the faithful of Naples who love their priest
May find their faith and their wealth increased;
For just as the stroke of midnight is here,
Those who with faithful undoubting mind
Their "Aves" mutter, their rosaries tell,
They without doubt shall a recompence find ;
Yea, their faith indeed shall profit them well.
Therefore, to-night, in the hot thronged street
By San Gennaro's, the people devout,
With banner, and relic, and thurible meet,
With some sacred image to marshal them out.
For a few days hence, the great lottery
Of the sinful city declared will be,
And it may be that Aves and Paters said
Will bring some aid from the realms of the dead.
And so to the terrible place of the tomb
They issue, a pitiful crowd, through the gloom,
To where all the dead of the city decay,
Waiting the trump of the judgment day.
For every day of the circling year
Brings its own sum of corruption here ;
Every day has its great pit, fed
With its dreadful heap of the shroudless dead.
NAPLES 293
And behind a grated rust-eaten door,
Marked each with their fated month and day,
The young and the old, who in life were poor,
Fester together and rot away.
Silence is there, the silence of death,
And in silence those poor pilgrims wearily pace,
And the wretched throng, pitiful, holding its
breath,
Comes with shambling steps to the dreadful place.
Till before these dark portals, the muttering
crowd
Breaks at length into passionate suffrages loud,
Waiting the flickering vapour thin,
Bred of the dreadful corruption within.
And here is a mother who kneels, not in woe,
By the vault where her child was flung months ago ;
And there is a strong man who peers with dry eyes
At the mouth of the gulph where his dead wife lies.
Till at last, to reward them, a faint blue fire,
Like the ghost of a soul, flickers here or there
At the gate of a vault, on the noisome air,
And the wretched throng has its low desire ;
And with many a praise of favouring saint,
And curses if any refuses to heed,
Full of low hopes and of sordid greed,
To the town they file backward, weary and faint.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And a few days hence, the great lottery
Of the sinful city declared will be,
And a number thus shewn to those sordid eyes,
May, the saints being willing, attain the prize.
Wherefore to Saint and Madonna be said,
All praise and laud, and the faithful dead!
* # *
It was long, long ago, in far-off Judaea,
That they slew Him of old, whom these slay to-
day;
They slew Him of old, in far-off Judaea,
It is long, long ago ; it was far, far away !
LEWIS MORRIS.
NAPLES
DELIGHTFUL city of Parthenope,
Still the soft airs that fan thee seem enchanted;
By song and beauty crescent shores still haunted
Along thy bright bay, once the siren's sea !
Well I remember, gazing now on thee,
The wishful dreams, with which my childhood
panted,
Of charms, in volumes of dumb Latin vaunted,
Or vowelled in rich Italian melody.
NAPLES 295
From Capri's rocky isle, where ruins grey
The memory of the first proud Caesars rear,
To where Misenum overlooks the bay,
Rome's galley-navy used to anchor near,
The shades of yore, the lights of yesterday,
Hallow each wall and wave and headland here !
WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON.
MT. VESUVIUS
VESUVIUS
VESUVIO, covered with the fruitful vine,
Here flourished once, and ran with floods of wine,
Here Bacchus oft to the cool shades retired,
And his own native Nisa less admired;
Oft to the mountain's airy tops advanced,
The frisking Satyrs on the summits danced ;
Alcides here, here Venus graced the shore,
Nor loved her favourite Lacedsemon more.
Now piles of ashes, spreading all around,
In undistinguished heaps deform the ground,
The gods themselves the ruined seats bemoan,
And blame the mischiefs that themselves have done.
MARTIAL.
Tr. Joseph Addison.
VESUVIUS
I
A WREATH of light-blue vapour, pure and rare,
Mounts, scarcely seen against the bluer sky,
In quiet adoration, silently,
296
MT. VESUVIUS 297
Till the faint currents of the upper air
Dislimn it, and it forms, dissolving there,
The dome, as of a palace, hung on high
Over the mountain ; underneath it lie
Vineyards and bays and cities, white and fair.
Might we not think this beauty would engage
All living things unto one pure delight?
O, vain belief ! for here, our records tell,
Rome's understanding tyrant from men's sight
Hid, as within a guilty citadel,
The shame of his dishonourable age.
n
As when unto a mother, having chid
Her child in anger, there have straight ensued
Repentings for her quick and angry mood,
Till she would fain see all its traces hid
Quite out of sight, even so has Nature bid
Fair flowers, that on the scarred earth she has
strewed,
To blossom, and called up the taller wood
To cover what she ruined and undid.
O, and her mood of anger did not last
More than an instant, but her work of peace,
Restoring and repairing, comforting
The Earth, her stricken child, will never cease:
For that was her strange work, and quickly past ;
To this her genial toil no end the years shall bring.
#98 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
III
That her destroying fury was with noise
And sudden uproar; but far otherwise,
With silent and with secret ministries,
Her skill of renovation she employs:
For Nature, only loud when she destroys,
Is silent when she fashions ; she will crowd
The work of her destruction, transient, loud,
Into an hour, and then long peace enjoys.
Yea, every power that fashions and upholds
Works silently, all things, whose life is sure,
Their life is calm ; silent the light that moulds
And colours all things ; and without debate
The stars, which are forever to endure,
Assume their thrones and their unquestioned state.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH.
VESUVIUS
DREAD, desolate Mount ! when first I gazed at thee
Lifting thy shadowy cone across the sea
Thou seemedst a remembered picture drawn
By boyhood's vision in some Southern dawn,
Twin spirit with the purple clouds that rest
In hazy light above thy towering crest.
But when I climbed thy bare and burning side,
And felt the scorching of that fiery tide
MT. VESUVIUS 299
Bubbling from thy hot lips, and saw the blight
Of thy dread power spread through the dusky
night,
Far down the black slopes to the ocean's skiffs,
When I beheld the drear and savage cliffs
Towering around me black and sulphur-drenched,
The burning cracks whose heat is never quenched,
I knew thou wast that desolating fount
Whose fearful flowing centuries might recount,
Whose fiery surge beat down, the marble pride
Of stainless fanes that slept too near thy side,
When fated cities of renowned fame
Fluttered like moths toward thy devouring flame.
Motionless Victor! Lord of fiery doom!
On thy dark helmet waves thy smoky plume ;
Wrapt in thy purple like a Syrian king,
While crouches at thy feet the shrinking Spring,
Thy fallen archangel's throne befits thee, thou
Who canst not bless, but curse. Thy blasted brow
Scowls with dull eye of hate that nightly broods
On dire events in thy drear solitudes.
Tireless thou burnest on from age to age.
No winter's rains, though yearly they assuage
Thy hot cheeks, where the lava tear-drops run
Down the black furrows, no joy-giving sun
Of balmy spring clothing thy ruggedness
With colours of all depth and tenderness,
No clouds of summer smiling on thy sleep,
300 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
No autumn vintage round thy fire-cloven steep,
Have charmed away the awful mystery
That burns within a heart no eye can see.
In the bright day thou mak'st the blue heavens
dun,
Blotting with blasphemous smoke the blessed sun.
No calmest starlit night can still thy curse
Breathed upward through the silent universe.
Last night we saw thee shrouded in a cloak
Of dull grey rain-clouds. From thy crater broke
Swift blazing spasms of flame that glimmered
through
The awful gloom of mist whose pallid hue
Half hid thy form, now dark, and flashing now
Like the dread oracles on Sinai's brow.
Prophetic mount ! Thou seemedst then to be
Wrapt in a vision of futurity,
Fearfully whispering words of joy or moan,
Whose sense was hidden in thy heart alone.
Nor seer alone of future days o'ercast,
But true historian of the blighted past,
Buried beneath thy feet thou chainest deep
Treasures of beauty in enchanted sleep:
Temples and streets and quaintly painted halls,
Vases and cups for antique festivals,
Fair statues in whose undulating line
The Grecian artist lavished dreams divine ;
MT. VESUVIUS 301
Altars that burned to gods of mighty name,
Until thy greater sacrificial flame
Swallowed the lesser. Princely art and power
Sank blood-warm in its grave in that dark hour
When thou, wild despot, even to the sea
Whose fevered waves shrank from the fear of thee
Meeting thy fire-kiss, didst send forth thy hosts,
Cloud-myrmidons of death, flooding the coasts
That smiled around thy blue enamelled bay.
Years rolled. The cities in their dungeons lay
Embalmed in lovely death. Long ages crept.
Flowers and luxuriant vines above them slept,
And still not half the wealth beneath that lies
Revisits the sweet light of summer skies.
So thou, stern chronicler, dialest thy dates,
Not by the ephemeral growth and change of
states,
But thunderous blasts upheaving from below,
That melt to mist the winter's hoarded snow,
By thy deep beds of fire, thy strata old,
And the slow creep of vegetable mould.
Yet fearful as thou towerest, seen so near,
In thy environment of blight and fear,
Beautiful art thou burning from afar
In liquid fire, as though a melting star
Had fallen upon thee from the sky profound,
And streamed adown thy sides which, gemmed
around,
302 THROUGH ITALY VTITH THE POETS
Sparkle like some dark Abyssinian queen
Robed in her amethyst and ruby sheen.
E'en now I see thee nightly from this bower
Where the red rose and the white orange-flower
Mingle their odours. Looking o'er the sea,
Thy shadowy cone of solemn mystery
Shoots downward in the waves a softened gleam,
Until, by beauty lulled, I can but dream
Of thee as of each gentle lovely thing
That in my path lies daily blossoming.
CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH.
CASTELLAMARE
AT CASTELLAMARE
AWAKE, my Myrto, with the birth of day,
Forth to the meadow fare this first of May.
Not yet the sun with his o'ermastering might
Hath dried the pearlets upon bud and bloom ;
Still in pale skies trembles the star of night,
Morn's herald star, and all the glorious gloom
Is waiting for the dawn to re-illume
Her eyes of fire above the burning bay.
Awake, my Myrto, with the birth of day,
Forth to the meadow fare this first of May.
See in thick pleached garden-alleys green
How rose by rose deep-sunken drinks the dew:
Sheathed in soft sleep they hide their silken sheen,
Nor know the passion of fierce light that
through
Their crimson spheres will shoot when morn is
new:
So sleep not we when love invites to play.
304 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Awake, my Myrto, with the birth of day,
Forth to the meadow fare this first of May.
Ah, foolish rose ! She hath one little hour
To cast her sweetness on the amorous prime ;
The kiss of noon her girlhood will deflower,
The wanton bee about her lap will climb,
And birds will sing their clear love-laden rhyme,
Till night descends that taketh all away.
Awake, my Myrto, with the birth of day,
Forth to the meadow fare this first of May.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
POMPEII
POMPEII
KNOW'ST thou yon stream, its veiny current
threading
Between the willow banks it loves, that makes
Its low voice heard by thee as thou art treading
That green bank thoughtfully ; the aspen shakes
Its boughs above, the deep sky gives and takes
Its azure from it, and that river keeps
Its name, while states have vanished as the flakes
Of snow, sun-melted : Sarno to the deeps
Rolls on, its waves no more the painted trireme
sweeps.
A rising mound shuts out the path, the wind
Waves the wild fig-tree o'er its flower-crowned
crest :
Enter, a world is opened from behind,
The dead are disinterred from Nature's breast,
The buried raised from their sepulchral rest ;
Living Pompeii again behold !
The vision in material life confessed;
Time hath the archives of the past unrolled,
Their household gods unveiled, and life domestic
told.
305
306 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
The City of the Dead to light restored,
And resurrection, day again began,
The law of fate suspended to record
The greatness and the nothingness of man:
Decay arrested and oblivion's ban
From wrecks that rise on life's cold shore alone :
Here, moralist! thou seest thy bounded span:
Truth stands embodied, and with audible tone
Points to the house, thy tomb, the dust that is
thine own.
Lo, the Pompeian Forum! haunt of rest,
And recreation when the twilight sky
Hued with its beauty the delighted west :
When the sea's rising breath refreshingly
Gladdened each heart, and soothed each wearied
eye
Oppressed and fevered with the heats of day :
Moments when life was felt, when the light sigh
Was pleasure, impulses that all obey,
As Nature o'er the heart asserts her healthful
sway.
* * #
The Street of Tombs! the dwelling-places rent
Of those who felt not fires that o'er them swept,
Engulfed within a living monument ;
But in those hollow niches where they slept,
Yea, in their urns the fiery vapor crept,
The mountain's ashes and the human dust
POMPEII 307
Together heaped: the dead no longer kept
Their couches, forth by earth convulsive thrust
From that last home where love the loved ones still
intrust.
The house of Diomed, the pleasant place
Of the refined patrician, where the hand
Of luxury ruled, and Art traced forms of grace
Which from time hidden could decay withstand ;
Playthings that shall again resolve to sand,
Opened to skyey influence and air,
All that his vanity or fondness planned ;
The law of nature it again doth share,
Decay, change, time, and death, too long evaded
there.
* * *
The town was hushed, save where a faint shout
came
From the far-distant amphitheatre,
Air glowed as from a sullen furnace flame :
The trees dropped wan, no breath a leaf to stir ;
Each house was noiseless as a sepulchre,
And the all-sickly weight by nature shown
Pressed heaviest on human hearts ; they were
All silent, each foreboding dared not own
Fears, the advancing shadows of an ill unknown.
Behold the Mountain! words withheld while
spoken,
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
In vision centering the astounded mind:
The mists that erewhile swathed his front are
broken,
Hurled upward as by some imprisoned wind
Earth could no more within her caverns bind ;
Lo, scroll-like forth in scattered wreathings
driven
From his cleft brow, grey clouds that disen-
twined
From their black trunk shot forth like branches
riven,
Opening their pine-like shape in the profound of
heaven !
Statues of fear, mute, motionless they stood :
The mountain that had slept a thousand years
Wakes from his slumber ! lo, yon sable flood
Of eddying cloud its giant shape uprears :
They gaze, yet fly not, who had linked with
fears
Vesuvius robed in ever green attire?
But lo, each moment wilder, fiercer nears
The unfolding canopy, its skirts respire
Lightnings around, away, yon lurid mass is fire!
JOHN EDMUND READE,
POMPEII 309
A GIRL OF POMPEII
A PUBLIC haunt they found her in:
She lay asleep, a lovely child ;
The only thing left undefiled
Where all things else bore taint of sin.
Her charming contours fixed in clay
The universal law suspend,
And turn Time's chariot back, and blend
A thousand years with yesterday.
A sinless touch, austere yet warm,
Around her girlish figure pressed,
Caught the sweet imprint of her breast,
And held her, surely clasped, from harm.
Truer than work of sculptor's art
Comes this dear maid of long ago,
Sheltered from woeful chance, to show
A spirit's lovely counterpart,
And bid mistrustful men be sure
That form shall fate of flesh escape,
And, quit of earth's corruptions, shape
Itself, imperishably pure.
EDWARD SANFORD MARTIN,
810 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
POMPEII
THE giant slept, and pigmies at his feet,
Like children moulding monuments of snow,
Piled stone on stone, mapped market-place and
street,
And saw their temples column-girdled grow:
And, slowly as the gradual glaciers grope
Their way resistless, so Pompeii crept,
Year by long year, across the shelving slope
Toward the sea : and still the giant slept.
Belted with gardens, where the shivered glass
Of falling fountains broke the pools' repose,
As they had been asleep upon the grass,
A myriad villas stretched themselves and rose:
And down her streets, grown long and longer still,
Grooving the new-laid stones, the chariots
swept,
And of a sudden burst upon the hill
Vast amphitheatres. Still the giant slept.
With liquid comment of the wooing doves,
With wanton flowers, sun-conjured from the
loam,
Grew the white city of illicit loves,
Hostess of all the infamy of Rome!
POMPEII 311
A marble harlot, scornful, pale, and proud,
Her Circean court on ruin's brink she kept,
Lulled by the adoration of the crowd
To lethal stupor. Still the giant slept.
Incense-encircled, pacing day by day
Through temple-courts reechoant with song,
Sin-stunned and impercipient, on her way
She dragged her languid loveliness along.
With lips whereon a dear damnation hung,
With dark, dream-clouded eyes that never wept,
Flawlessly fair, the faulty fair among,
She kissed and cursed: and still the giant
slept.
Here, for a mute reminder of her shame,
Her ruins gape out baldly from their tomb ;
A city naked, shorn of all but name,
Blinking and blind from all her years of gloom :
A beldam who was beauty, crying amis
With leprous lips that mouth their prayers in
vain;
Her deaf destroyer to her outstretched palms
Respondeth not. The giant sleeps again !
GUY WETMOEE CAEEYL.
SORRENTO
SORRENTO
SORRENTO ! Bright star ! Land
Of myrtle and vine,
I come from a far land
To kneel at thy shrine;
Thy brows wear a garland,
O, weave one for mine!
Her mirror thy city
Fair finds in the sea,
A youth sings a pretty
Song, tempered with glee,
The mirth and the ditty
Are mournful to me.
Ah, sea boy, how strange is
The carol you sing !
Let Psyche, who ranges
The gardens of Spring,
Remember the changes
December will bring.
FREDERICK LOCKER.
312
SORRENTO SIS
SORRENTO
MIDWAY betwixt the present and the past,
Naples and Paestum, look ! Sorrento lies :
Ulysses built it, and the Syrens cast
Their spell upon the shore, the sea, the skies.
If thou hast dreamed, in any dream of thine,
How Paradise appears, or those Elysian
Immortal meadows which the gods assign
Unto the pure of heart, behold thy vision !
These waters, they are blue beyond belief,
Nor hath green England greener fields than
these :
The sun, 't is Italy's ; here winter's brief
And gentle visit hardly chills the breeze.
Here Tasso dwelt, and here inhaled with spring
The breath of passion and the soul of song.
Here young Boccaccio plumed his early wing,
Thenceforth to soar above the vulgar throng.
All charms of contrast every nameless grace
That lives in outline, harmony, or hue
So heighten all the romance of the place,
That the rapt artist maddens at the view,
And then despairs, and throws his pencil by,
And sits all day and looks upon the shore
And the calm ocean with a languid eye,
As though to labour there were a law no more*
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Voluptuous coast! no wonder that the proud
Imperial Roman found in yonder isle
Some sunshine still to gild Fate's gathering cloud,
And lull the storm of conscience for a while.
What new Tiberius, tired of lust and life,
May rest him here to give the world a truce,
A little truce from perjury and strife,
Justice adulterate and power's misuse?
Might the gross Bourbon, he that sleeps in spite
Of red Vesuvius ever in his eye,
Yet, if he wake, should tremble at its light,
As 't were heaven's vengeance, promised from
on high,
Or that poor gamester, of so cunning play,
Who, up at last, in Fortune's fickle dance,
Aping the mighty in so mean a way,
Makes now his dice the destinies of France,
Might they, or any of Oppression's band,
Sit here and learn the lesson of the scene,
Peace might return to many a bleeding land,
And men grow just again, and life serene.
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS.
SORRENTO 815
WRITTEN IN TASSO'S HOUSE AT
SORRENTO
O LEONORA, here thy Tasso dwelt,
Secure, ere yet thy beauty he had seen:
Here with bright face and unterrestrial mien
He walked, ere yet thy shadow he had felt.
From that green rock he watched the sunset melt,
On through the waves ; yon cavern was his screen,
When first those hills, which gird the glowing
scene,
Were thronged with heavenly warriors, and he
knelt
To hail the vision ! Syren baths to him
Were nothing ; Pagan grot, or classic fane,
Or glistening pavement seen through billows dim.
Far, far o'er these he gazed on Judah's plain ;
And more than manhood wrought was in the
boy,
Why did the stranger meddle in his joy?
AUBREY DE VERE.
SORRENTO
THE midnight, thick with cloud,
Hangs o'er the city's jar,
The spirit's shell is in the crowd,
The spirit is afar ;
316 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Far, where in shadowy gloom
Sleeps the dark orange grove,
My sense is drunk with its perfume,
My heart with love.
The slumberous, whispering sea
Creeps up the sands to lay
Its sliding bosom fringed with pearls
Upon the rounded bay.
List! all the trembling leaves
Are rustling overhead,
Where purple grapes are hanging dark
On the trellised loggia spread.
Far off, a misted cloud,
Hangs fair Inarime.
The boatman's song from the lighted boat
Rises from out the sea.
We listen, then thy voice
Pours forth a honeyed rhyme;
Ah! for the golden nights we passed
In our Italian time.
There is the laugh of girls
That walk along the shore,
The marinaio calls to them
As he suspends his oar.
Vesuvius rumbles sullenly,
With fitful lurid gleam,
SORRENTO 317
The background of all Naples life,
The nightmare of its dream.
O lovely, lovely Italy,
I yield me to thy spell!
Reach the guitar, my dearest friend,
We'll sing, "Home ! fare thee well!"
O world of work and noise,
What spell hast thou for me?
The siren Beauty charms me here
Beyond the sea.
WILLIAM WETMORE STORY.
LOOKING BACK
(At Sorrento, March, 1864.)
WHY murmur, why look back, my soul?
Six long years like an ocean roll
Between thy youth and thee.
Thou hast the present; keep that fast:
Trust not the future ; drown the past :
What thou art, learn to be.
Deep orange groves by Naples' shore,
Warm slopes with laughing olives hoar,
The myrtle by the bay :
Bright flowers that in the thickets blow,
Soft airs that melt the mountain snow,
Showers weeping silver spray:
318 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
All these thou hast ; and dost thou sigh
For Clifton's oft beclouded sky,
Her woods and barren down ;
The tawny strait, the narrow stream,
The cliff where thou wast wont to dream
The tumult of the town ;
The old Cathedral, quaint and grey,
Where stately service, day by day,
From choir and organ pealed;
The little face, loved long ago,
The thrilling treble, faint and low,
The pain its music healed?
The memory of that sacred spring
Still stirs my soul to sorrowing;
She cannot choose but sigh.
I dwelt as in a magic isle
With fairy fancies to beguile
My life's monotony.
Love was the wand I swayed at will:
Not Ischia's slope nor Capri's hill
Have joys so fair and free,
As in that brief enchanted spring
From every humble household thing
I fashioned for my glee.
Too soon it fled ; and year by year
Came slowly trooping care and fear
Spent powers and clouded faith:
A sorrow to my spirit clung
SORRENTO 819
A pang, not mine, whose poison stung
The soul it could not scathe.
Nor health nor hope remained ; I fled
From land to land; my weary head
In strangers' homes I laid:
And now, by fair Sorrento's bay,
I sit and sigh this sweet spring day,
Beneath the olive shade.
The birds may murmur as they will.
The kids may leap upon the hill,
The wavelets on their sand:
But I must bear an even heart,
Proof against pain or passion's smart;
Unstirred, unshaken, stand.
Once more I will begin to live ;
The future much may have to give;
Her face I cannot see;
But feel as though the past had been
Played out unto its utmost scene,
The stage swept clear and free.
Bid memory with each rolling year
Fold fainter wings, and disappear;
Then wrap thy soul in strength:
There's rest beneath the weltering wave;
There's rest in heaven though storms may rave;
Thou too shalt rest at length.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
CAPRI
CAPRI
THERE is an isle, kissed by a smiling sea,
Where all sweet confluents meet : a thing of heaven,
A spent aerolite, that well may be
The missing sister of the starry Seven.
Celestial beauty nestles at its knee,
And in its lap is naught of earthly leaven.
'T is girt and crowned with loveliness; its year,
Eternal summer ; winter comes not near.
'T is small, as things of beauty ofttimes are,
And in a morning round it you may row,
Nor need a tedious haste your bark debar
From gliding inwards where the ripples flow
Into strange grots whose roofs are azure spar,
Whose pavements liquid silver. Mild winds blow
Around your prow, and at your keel the foam,
Leaping and laughing, freshly wafts you home.
They call the island Capri, with a name
Dulling an airy dream, just as the soul
Is clogged with body palpable, and Fame
Hath long while winged the word from pole to
pole.
320
CAPEI 321
Its human story is a tale of shame,
Of all unnatural lusts a gory scroll,
Record of what, when pomp and power agree,
Man once hath been, and man again may be.
Terrace and slope from shore to summit show
Of all rich climes the glad-surrendered spoil.
Here the bright olive's phantom branches glow,
There the plump fig sucks sweetness from the soil.
Mid odorous flowers that through the Zodiac blow,
Returning tenfold to man's leisured toil,
Hesperia's fruit hangs golden. High in air,
The vine runs riot, spurning human care.
And flowers of every hue and breath abound,
Charming the sense ; the burning cactus glows,
Like daisies elsewhere dappling all the ground,
And in each cleft the berried myrtle blows.
The playful lizard glides and darts around,
The elfin fireflies flicker o'er the rows
Of ripened grain. Alien to pain and wrong,
Men fill the days with dance, the nights with song.
ALFRED AUSTIN.
THE AZURE GROTTO
I
BENEATH the vine-clad slopes of Capri's Isle,
Which run down to the margin of that sea
Whose waters kiss the sweet Parthenope,
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
There is a grot whose rugged front the while
Frowns only dark where all is seen to smile.
But enter, and behold! surpassing fair
The magic sight that meets your vision there,
Not heaven ! with all its broad expanse of blue,
Gleams coloured with a sheen so rich, so rare,
So changing in its clear, translucent hue;
Glassed in the lustrous wave, the walls and roof
Shine as does silver scattered o'er the woof
Of some rich robe, or bright as stars whose light
Inlays the azure concave of the night.
II
You cannot find throughout this world, I ween,
Waters so fair as those within this cave,
Colour like that which flashes from the wave,
Or which is steeped in such cerulean sheen
As here gleams forth within this grotto's screen.
And when the oar the boatman gently takes
And dips it in the flood, a fiery glow,
Ruddy as phosphor, stirs in depths below;
Each ripple into burning splendour breaks,
As though some hidden fires beneath did lie
Waiting a touch to kindle into flame,
And shine in radiance on the dazzled eye,
As sparkling up from wells of light they came,
To make this grot a glory far and nigh.
CHARLES D, BELL,
AMALFI
AT AMALFI
IT is the mid-May sun that ray less and peacefully
gleaming,
Out of its night's short prison this blessed of lands
is redeeming;
It is the fire evoked from the hearts of the citron
and orange,
So that they hang, like lamps of the day, trans-
lucently beaming ;
It is the veinless water, and air unsoiled by a
vapour,
Save what, out of the fulness of life, from the
valley is streaming;
It is the olive that smiles, even he, the sad growth
of the moonlight,
Over the flowers, whose breasts triple-folded with
odours are teeming ;
Yes, it is these bright births that to me are a shame
and an anguish;
They are alive and awake, I dream, and know I
am dreaming;
I cannot bathe my soul in this ocean of passion and
beauty,
324* THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Not one dewdrop is on me of all that about me is
streaming ;
O, I am thirsty for life, I pant for the freshness
of nature,
Bound in the world's dead sleep, dried up by its
treacherous seeming.
LORD HOUGHTON.
AMALFI
SWEET the memory is to me
Of a land beyond the sea,
Where the waves and mountains meet,
Where amid her mulberry-trees
Sits Amalfi in the heat,
Bathing ever her white feet
In the tideless summer seas.
In the middle of the town,
From its fountains in the hills,
Tumbling through the narrow gorge,
The Canneto rushes down,
Turns the great wheels of the mills,
Lifts the hammers of the forge.
? T is a stairway, not a street,
That ascends the deep ravine,
Where the torrent leaps between
Rocky walls that almost meet.
AMALFI 525
Toiling up from stair to stair
Peasant girls their burdens bear ;
Sunburnt daughters of the soil,
Stately figures tall and straight,
What inexorable fate
Dooms them to this life of toil?
Lord of vineyards and of lands,
Far above the convent stands.
On its terraced walk aloof
Leans a monk with folded hands,
Placid, satisfied, serene,
Looking down upon the scene
Over wall and red-tiled roof;
Wondering unto what good end
All this toil and traffic tend,
And why all men cannot be
Free from care and free from pain,
And the sordid love of gain,
And as indolent as he.
Where are now the freighted barks
From the marts of east and west;
Where the knights in iron sarks
Journeying to the Holy Land,
Glove of steel upon the hand,
Cross of crimson on the breast?
Where the pomp of camp and court?
Where the pilgrims with their prayers?
326 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Where the merchants with their wares,
And their gallant brigantines
Sailing safely into port
Chased by corsair Algerines?
Vanished like a fleet of cloud,
Like a passing trumpet-blast,
Are those splendours of the past,
And the commerce and the crowd !
Fathoms deep beneath the seas
Lie the ancient wharves and quays,
Swallowed by the engulfing waves ;
Silent streets and vacant halls,
Ruined roofs and towers and walls;
Hidden from all mortal eyes
Deep the sunken city lies:
Even cities have their graves!
This is an enchanted land!
Round the headlands far away
Sweeps the blue Salernian bay
With its sickle of white sand:
Further still and furthermost
On the dim discovered coast
Psestum with its ruins lies,
And its roses all in bloom
Seem to tinge the fatal skies
Of that lonely land of doom.
AMALFI
On his terrace, high in air,
Nothing doth the good monk care
For such worldly themes as these.
From the garden just below
Little puffs of perfume blow,
And a sound is in his ears
Of the murmur of the bees
In the shining chestnut-trees;
All the landscape seems to swoon
In the happy afternoon ;
Slowly o'er his senses creep
The encroaching waves of sleep,
And he sinks, as sank the town,
Unresisting, fathoms down,
Into caverns cool and deep !
Walled about with drifts of snow,
Hearing the fierce north-wind blow,
Seeing all the landscape white,
And the river cased in ice,
Comes this memory of delight,
Comes this vision unto me
Of a long-lost Paradise,
In the land beyond the sea.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
AT AMALFI
HERE might I rest for ever ; here,
Till death, inviolate of fear,
Descended cloud-like on calm eyes,
Enjoy the whisper of the waves
Stealing around those azure caves,
The gloom and glory of the skies !
Great mother, Nature, on thy breajst
Let me, unsoiled by sorrow, rest,
By sin unstirred, by love made free :
Full-tired am I by years that bring
The blossoms of the tardy spring
Of wisdom, thine adept to be.
In vain I pray : the wish expires
Upon my lip, as fade the fires
Of youth in withered veins and weak ;
Not mine to dwell, the neophyte
Of Nature, in her shrine of light,
But still to strive and still to seek.
I have outgrown the primal mirth
That throbs in air and sea and earth;
The world of worn humanity
Reclaims my care ; at ease to range
Those hills, and watch their interchange
Of light and gloom, is not for me.
AMALFI 329
Dread Pan, to thee I turn: thy soul
That through the living world doth roll,
Stirs in our heart an aching sense
Of beauty, too divinely wrought
To be the food of mortal thought,
For earth-born hunger too intense.
Breathless we sink before thy shrine ;
We pour our spirits forth like wine ;
With trembling hands we strive to lift
The veil of airy amethyst,
That shrouds thy godhood like a mist ;
Then, dying, forth to darkness drift
Thy life around us laughs, and we
Are merged in its immensity ;
Thy chanted melodies we hear,
The marrying chords that meet and kiss
Between two silences ; but miss
The meaning, though it seems so clear.
From suns that sink o'er silent seas,
From myrtles near the mountain breeze
Shedding their drift of scented snow,
From fleeting hues, from sounds that swoon
On pathless hills, from night and noon,
The inarticulate passions flow,
330 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
That are thy minions, mighty Pan!
No priest hast thou ; no muse or man
Hath ever told, shall ever tell,
But each within his heart alone,
Awe-struck and dumb hath learned to own,
The burden of thine oracle.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
P^ESTUM
PJESTUM
Lo, far on the horizon's verge reclined
A temple, reared as on a broken throne :
The sun's red rays in lurid light declined
O'er clouds that mutter forth a thunder-tone,
Gleam athwart each aerial column shown
Like giants standing on a sable sky ;
What record tells it in that desert lone?
Resting in solitary majesty
Eternal Paestum there absorbs the heart and eye.
Pause here, the desolate waste, the lowering
heaven,
The sea-fowl's dang, the gray mist hurry-
ing by,
The altar fronting ye with brow unriven,
In isolation of sublimity,
Mates with the clouds, the mountains, and the
sky:
But the sea breaks no more against his shrine,
Hurled from his base the ocean-deity ;
His worshippers have passed and left no sign.
The Shaker of the Earth no more is held divine !
881
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
There like some Titan throned in his retreat
Of deserts, the declining sun's last rays
Falling round him on his majestic seat,
Each limb dilated in the twilight haze
Of the red distance darkening on the gaze :
An image whose august tranquillity
The presence of unconscious power betrays,
Whose co-mates are the hills, the rocks, the sea,
Even so the awestruck soul reposing dwells on
thee!
And there thou standest stern, austere, sublime,
Strength nakedly reposing at thy base,
Making a mockery of the assaults of time ;
Earthquakes have heaved, storms shook, the
lightning's trace
Left the black shadows time shall not efface,
And the hot levin dinted where it fell !
But on thy unperturbed and steadfast face
Is stamped the impress of the unchangeable,
That fixed forever there thy massive form shall
dwell.
Spirit of grey Antiquity ! enthroned
With solitude and silence here, proclaim
Thou, brooding o'er thy altar-place, who
owned,
Who reared, that mightiest temple? from
whence came
PJSSTUM 333
The children of the sea? what age, what name,
Bore they who chose this plain their home to
be?
Arena meted for the race of fame :
For gods to applaud the deeds of liberty,
Knowledge, and glorious art, that flows but from
the free.
JOHN EDMUND READE.
PJESTUM
THERE, down Salerno's bay,
In deserts far away,
Over whose solitudes
The dread malaria broods,
No labour tills the land,
Only the fierce brigand,
Or shepherd, wan and lean,
O'er the wide plains is seen.
Yet there, a lovely dream,
There Grecian temples gleam,
Whose form and mellowed tone
Rival the Parthenon.
The Sybarite no more
Comes hither to adore,
With perfumed offering,
The ocean god and king.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
The deity is fled
Long since, but, in his stead,
The smiling sea is seen,
The Doric shafts between ;
And round the time-worn base
Climb vines of tender grace,
And Paestum's roses still
The air with fragrance fill.
CHEISTOPHEE PEAESE CEANCH,
POSILIPO
THE VOYAGE AROUND POSILIPO
I CAME from Naples at break of day
And cast my cares in the shimmering bay.
The heaving row-boat gently rocked me,
And on the left Vesuvius mocked me,
Transforming his ill-starred, sinister steam
To faery haze in the first sunbeam.
I turned from the giant to see the city
Awake and make herself look pretty,
Adorning her head with a crown of castles,
And being bathed by the waves, her vassals.
I followed the hem of her garment damp
Toward the outermost verge of her regal camp.
Toledo-noises died away ;
I only heard my oars at play.
*****
And where a hill was all in bloom
I raised my hat to Virgil's tomb.
335
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
II
I slipped along the seashore. Bright
Posilipo upon my right.
Leftward a lovely island lay
Before the ships that left the bay.
When I saw Capri I grew serious,
For thither the vile wolf Tiberius
Once fled from Rome in fierce disgust,
To wallow in his horrid lust.
I promptly turned my eyes away
To where a bed of flowers lay,
Tufting a headland gorgeously,
And fringed by an unruffled sea.
Huge boulders lent their harsh effect,
Steep hills leaped from the water, decked
With bright straw here, and there with vines ;
With palm-trees here and there with pines.
Now scattered houses came to view,
The new made old and the old made new.
Then, ruins rising from the sea,
Vocal of dead pomposity,
Where Romans once built on the strand,
Unsatisfied with the solid land.
FRIEDERICH RUECKERT.
Tr. Robert Haven Schauffler.
POSILIPO 337
VIRGIL'S TOMB
"Cecini pascua, rura, duces"
ON an olive-crested steep
Hanging o'er the dusty road,
Lieth in his last abode,
Wrapped in everlasting sleep,
He who in the days of yore
Sang of pastures, sang of farms,
Sang of heroes and their arms,
Sang of passion, sang of war.
When the lark at dawning tells,
Herald-like, the coming day,
And along the dusty way
Comes the sound of tinkling belLs,
Rising to the tomb aloft,
While some modern Corydon
Drives his bleating cattle on
From the stable to the croft:
Then the soul of Virgil seems
To awaken from its dreams,
To sing again the melodies
Of which he often tells,
The music of the birds,
The lowing of the herds,
The tinkling of the bells.
ROBERT CAMEEON ROGERS.
338 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
VIRGIL'S TOMB
WE seek, as twilight saddens into gloom,
A poet's sepulchre ; and here it is,
The summit of a tufa precipice.
Ah ! precious every drape of myrtle bloom
And leaf of laurel crowning Virgil's tomb !
The low vault entering, hark! what sound is this?
The night is black beneath us in the abyss,
Through one damp port disclosed, as from earth's
womb,
That rumbling sound appalls us! Through the
steep
Is hewn Posilipo's most marvellous grot ;
And to the Prince of Roman bards, whose sleep
Is in this singular and lonely spot,
Doth a wild rumour give a wizard's name,
Linking a tunnelled road to Maro's fame !
WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON.
POZZUOLI
THE AMPHITHEATRE AT POZZUOLI
THE strife, the gushing blood, the mortal throe,
With scenic horrors, filled that belt below,
And where the polished seats were round it raised,
Worse spectacle! the pleased spectators gazed.
Such were the pastimes of times past ! O shame !
O infamy ! that men who drew the breath
Of freedom, and who shared the Roman name,
Should so corrupt their sports with pain and
death.
HENRY TAYLOR.
389
BAJA (BALE)
BAI.E
THERE Baiae sees no more the joyous throng;
Her bank all beaming with the pride of Rome :
No generous vines now bask along the hills,
Where sport the breezes of the Tyrrhene main :
With baths and temples mixed, no villas rise ;
Nor, art sustained amid reluctant waves,
Draw the cool murmurs of the breathing deep :
No spreading ports their sacred arms extend:
No mighty moles the big intrusive storm,
From the calm station, roll resounding back.
An almost total desolation sits,
A dreary stillness saddening o'er the coast;
Where, when soft suns and tepid winters rose,
Rejoicing clouds inhaled the balm of peace;
Where citied hill to hill reflected blaze ;
And where, with Ceres, Bacchus wont to hold
A genial strife. Her youthful form, robust,
E'en Nature yields ; by fire and earthquake rent :
Whole stately cities in the dark abrupt
Swallowed at once, or vile in rubbish laid,
340
BAJA (BALE) 841
A nest for serpents ; from the red abyss
New hills, explosive, thrown ; the Lucrine lake
A reedy pool: and all to Cuma's point,
The sea recovering his usurped domain,
And poured triumphant o'er the buried dome.
JAMES THOMSON.
RUINS OF CORNELIA'S HOUSE
I TURN from ruins of imperial power,
Tombs of corrupt delight, old walls the pride
Of statesmen pleased for respite brief to hide
Their laurelled foreheads in the Muses' bower,
And seek Cornelia's home. At sunset's hour
How oft her eyes, that wept no more, descried
Yon purpling hills ! How oft she heard that tide
Fretting as now low cave or hollow tower !
The mother of the Gracchi ! Scipio's child !
'T was virtue such as hers that built her Rome !
Never towards it she gazed ! Far off her home
She made, like her great father self-exiled.
Woe to the nations when the souls they bare,
Their best and bravest, choose their rest elsewhere
AUBREY DE VERE.
348 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
BALE
BUT Baiae, soft retreat in days of yore,
Recalls our step, and woos us to its shore.
Heroes and emperors trod this smiling strand,
And art, song, pleasure reigned, a fairy band.
Here Csesar stooped his pride to garden bowers,
And stern-browed Marius wreathed his sword with
flowers ;
Here rich Lucullus gorgeous banquets spread,
And Pollio time in chains of roses led :
Steeped in warm bliss seemed ocean, earth, and
sky,
Life one rich dream of love and luxury.
NICHOLAS MICHELL.
CUMA (CUM^J)
CUM.E
WEEPING he spoke, then gave his fleet the reins,
Until at length Euboean Cumse's shores
They reach. Seaward the prows are turned; the
ships
Fast anchored, and the curved sterns fringe the
beach.
On the Hesperian shore the warriors leap
With eager haste. Some seek the seminal flame
Hid in the veins of flint ; some rob the woods,
The dense abode of beasts, and rivulets
Discover. But the good ^Eneas seeks
The heights o'er which the great Apollo rules,
And the dread cavern where the Sibyl dwells,
Revered afar, whose soul the Delian god
Inspires with thought and passion, and to her
Reveals the future. And now Dian's groves
They enter, and the temple roofed with gold.
The story goes, that Daedalus, who fled
From Minos, dared to trust himself with wings
Upon the air, and sailed in untried flight
Toward the frigid Arctic, till at length
He hovered over the Cumaean towers.
843
344 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Here first restored to earth, he gave to thee,
Phoebus, his oar-like wings, a sacred gift,
And built a spacious temple to thy name.
VIRGIL.
Tr. C. P. Cranch.
THE SIBYL'S CAVE AT CUMA
CUMEAN Sibyl! from thy sultry cave
Thy dark eyes level with the sulphurous ground
Through the gloom flashing, roll in wrath around.
What see they? Coasts perpetual earthquakes
pave
With ruin ; piles half buried in the wave ;
Wrecks of old times and new in lava drowned;
And festive crowds, sin-steeped and myrtle-
crowned,
Like idiots dancing on a parent's grave.
And they foresee. Those pallid lips with pain
Suppress their thrilling whispers. Sibyl, spare !
Could Wisdom's voice divide yon sea, or rear
A new Vesuvius from its flaming plane,
Futile the warning! Power despised! forbear
To deepen guilt by counsel breathed in vain !
AUBREY DE VERB,
ISCHIA
INARIME
Vittoria Colonna, after the death of her hus-
band, the Marchese di Pescara, retired to her cas-
tle at Ischia (Inarime), and there wrote the ode
upon his death which gained her the title of
Divine.
ONCE more, once more, Inarime,
I see thy purple hills once more
I hear the billows of the bay
Wash the white pebbles on thy shore.
High o'er the sea-surge and the sands,
Like a great galleon wrecked and cast
Ashore by storms, thy castle stands,
A mouldering landmark of the Past.
Upon its terrace-walk I see
A phantom gliding to and fro ;
It is Colonna, it is she
Who lived and loved so long ago.
Pescara's beautiful young wife,
The type of perfect womanhood,
Whose life was love, the life of life,
That time and change and death withstood.
345
84*6 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
For death, that breaks the marriage band
In others, only closer pressed
The wedding-ring upon her hand
And closer locked and barred her breast.
She knew the life-long martyrdom,
The weariness, the endless pain
Of waiting for some one to come
Who nevermore would come again.
The shadows of the chestnut-trees,
The odor of the orange blooms,
The song of birds, and, more than these,
The silence of deserted rooms;
The respiration of the sea,
The soft caresses of the air,
All things in nature seemed to be
But ministers of her despair ;
Till the o'erburdened heart, so long
Imprisoned in itself, found vent
And voice in one impassioned song
Of inconsolable lament.
Then as the sun, though hidden from sight,
Transmutes to gold the leaden mist,
Her life was interfused with light,
From realms that, though unseen, exist.
ISCHIA
Inarime ! Inarime !
Thy castle on the crags above
In dust shall crumble and decay,
But not the memory of her love.
HENKY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
REGGIO (RHEGIUM)
ON IBYCUS
RHEGIUM, whose feet Trinacria's straitened sea
Laves ever, verge extreme of Italy,
Honoured be thou in song for having laid
Under thy leafy elms' embowering shade
The dust of Ibycus, the bard beloved,
The bard of Love, wko all its joys had proved;
Mantle his grave with ivy, round it plant
Reeds, to send forth the shepherd's rural chant.
UNCERTAIN.
Tr. W. Hay.
REGGIO
AND shouldst thou doubt the visible prophecies
Of Nature, in her forms embodying
Imaginative dreams, when the sun lies
On Reggio's shore, go mark its ruins fling
Their shadows on the stream, till gathering,
Embattled towers rise slowly from the deep,
Pillars and castled walls, gates opening
On serried armies, marshalled horse that leap
Along the flying plains, and charging squadrons
sweep.
848
REGGIO (RHEGIUM) 349
And cliffs cloud-capped, deep vales, white herds
far seen,
And shepherds with their flocks, and mountains
bare,
Looking repose : lo ! in the silvery sheen
Floating above the wave, they melt to air,
Reflection but of ruins ! woven there
From mist and shadow, but they finger forth
Truths that oracular Nature doth declare
To thee, fallen Italy! regenerate birth
Thus shall be thine from death, freedom and pris-
tine worth.
JOHN EDMUND READE.
THE RIVER BUSENTO
THE GRAVE IN THE BUSENTO
BY Cosenza, songs of wail at midnight wake Busen-
to's shore,
O'er the wave resounds the answer, and amid the
vortex' roar!
Valiant Goths, like specters, steal along the banks
with hurried pace,
Weeping over Alaric dead, the best, the bravest
of his race.
Ah ! too soon, from home so far, was it their lot to
dig his grave,
While still o'er his shoulders flowed his youthful
ringlets' flaxen wave.
On the shore of the Busento ranged, they with
each other vied,
As they dug another bed to turn the torrent's
course aside.
In the t waveless hollow turning o'er and o'er the
sod, the corse
Deep into the earth they sank, in armour clad,
upon his horse.
350
THE RIVER BUSENTO 351
Covered then with earth again the horse and rider
in the grave,
That above the hero's tomb the torrent's lofty
plants might wave.
And, a second time diverted, was the floor con-
ducted back,
Foaming rushed Busento's billows onwards in their
wonted track.
And a warrior chorus sang, "Sleep with thy hon-
ours, hero brave !
"Ne'er shall foot of lucre-lusting Roman desecrate
thy grave!"
Far and wide the songs of praise resounded in the
Gothic host;
Bear them on, Busento's billow, bear them on from
coast to coast!
AUGUST VON PLATEN.
Tr. Alfred Baskerville.
TARANTO (TARENTUM)
TARENTUM
AND next Tarentum's bay,
Named, if report be true, from Hercules,
Is seen; and opposite lifts up her head
The goddess of Lacinia ; and the heights
Appear of Caulon, and the dangerous rocks
Of Sylaceum. Then far off we see
Trinacrian ^Etna rising from the waves;
And now we hear the ocean's awful roar,
The breakers dashing on the rocks, the moan
Of broken voices on the shore. The deeps
Leap up, and sand is mixed with boiling foam.
"Charybdis !" cries Anchises ; "lo, the cliffs,
The dreadful rocks that Helenus foretold!
Save us, bear off, my men ! With equal stroke
Bend to your oars !" No sooner said than done.
With groaning rudder Palinurus turns
The prow to the left, and the whole cohort strain
With oar and sail, and seek a southern course.
The curving wave one moment lifts us up
Skyward, then sinks us down as in the shades
Of death. Three times amid their hollow caves
853
TAEANTO (TARENTUM) 353
The cliffs resound ; three times we saw the foam
Dashed, that the stars hung dripping wet with
dew.
Meanwhile, abandoned by the wind and sun,
Weary, and ignorant of our course, we are thrown
Upon the Cyclops' shore.
VIRGIL.
Tr. C. P. Cranch.
BRINDISI (BRUNDISIUM)
BRUNDISIUM
UNEQUAL thus to Caesar, Pompey yields
The fair dominion of Hesperia's fields :
Swift through Apulia march his flying powers,
And seek the safety of Brundusium's towers.
This city a Dictsean people hold,
Here placed by tall Athenian barks of old;
When with false omens from the Cretan shore,
Their sable sails victorious Theseus bore.
Here Italy a narrow length extends,
And in a scanty slip projected ends.
A crooked mole around the waves she winds,
And in her folds the Adriatic binds.
Nor yet the bending shores could form a bay,
Did not a barrier isle the winds delay,
And break the seas tempestuous in their way.
Huge mounds of rocks are placed by nature's
hand,
To guard around the hospitable strand;
To turn the storm, repulse the rushing tide,
And bid the anchoring bark securely ride.
Hence Nereus wide the liquid main displays,
And spreads to various ports his watery ways;
854
BRINDISI (BRUNDISIUM) 355
Whether the pilot from Corcyra stand
Or for Illyrian Epidamnus' strand.
Hither when all the Adriatic roars,
And thundering billows vex the double shores ;
When sable clouds around the welkin spread,
And frowning storms involve Ceraunia's head ;
When white with froth Calabrian Sason lies,
Hither the tempest-beaten vessel flies.
LUCAN.
Tr. Nicholas Rowe.
ANCONA
POPPIES IN THE WHEAT
ALONG Ancona's hills the shimmering heat,
A tropic tide of air, with ebb and flow-
Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow
Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat
Around the vines. The poppies lithe and fleet
Seem running, fiery torchmen, to and fro
To mark the shore. The farmer does not know
That they are there. He walks with heavy feet,
Counting the bread and wine for autumn's gain,
But I, I smile to think that days remain
Perhaps to me in which, though bread be sweet
No more, and red wine warm my blood in vain,
I shall be glad remembering how the fleet,
Lithe poppies ran like torchmen with the wheat.
HELEN FISKE JACKSON.
356
FOSSOMBRONE
THE BELLS OF FOSSOMBRONE
UP the highlands, steep and stony,
To the valley-wending throng,
Rang the bells of Fossombrone
Silvery eve and matin song.
Rang they proud and rang they peerless,
Rang they with ecstatic thrill;
And their music cheered the cheerless,
Aye ! 'tis said it healed the ill.
Then the Lord of Fano vaunted,
"Great are we, and shall the dells
By rough mountain toilers haunted
With their chimes outpeal our bells?"
So upon a morning moany,
When the heavens were a-lower,
Stormed they into Fossombrone,
Haled the bells from out the tower.
"When the Easter dawns," they boasted,
"We will ring our triumph wide !"
And that night they blithely toasted
Fano's power and Fano's pride.
357
358 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Passed the year's young pilgrim daughters
Days both jubilant and lorn
Till o'er Adria's waste of waters,
Rose-like, flowered the Easter morn.
While the harbour shimmered steely,
And the bloom of morning grew,
Toward the stately campanile
Strode the ringers, two by two.
Soared a shout of acclamation
Up as if some Titan spoke,
And with murmurous exultation
Waited each the triumph stroke.
Gnarled muscles swelled with tension
As the ringers strained and bowed;
Then a wave of apprehension
Swept upon the gathered crowd ;
For they saw the bells wide-swinging,
Mouths agape as though to peal,
Yet they heard no sound down-ringing
From the yawning throats of steel.
Cried one loudly, "We should rue us
For the tale this Easter tells !
Hath not Jesus spoken to us
In the silence of these bells?
FOSSOMBRONE 359
"Back with them to Fossombrone !"
Swiftly back their prize they bore,
And beneath the highlands stony
Found the bells their voice once more.
And the men of Fano, chided
By the melody renewed,
Clasped the hands of those derided,
Buried deep the olden feud.
Seaward from the mountain valley,
Heralding the happier times,
Rang through grove and olive alley
Fossombrone's peerless chimes.
CLINTON SCOLLARD.
FANO
THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
DEAR and great angel, wouldst thou only leave
That child, when thou hast done with him, for
me
Let me sit all the day here, that when eve
Shall find performed thy special ministry
And time come for departure, thou, suspending
Thy flight, mayst see another child for tending,
Another still, to quiet and retrieve.
Then I shall feel thee step one step, no more,
From where thou standest now, to where I gaze,
And suddenly my head be covered o'er
With those wings, white above the child who
prays
Now on that tomb, and I shall feel thee guarding
Me, out of all the world ; for me discarding
Yon heaven thy home, that waits and opes its
door!
I would not look up thither past thy head
Because the door opes, like that child, I know,
For I should have thy gracious face instead,
Thou bird of God ! and wilt thou bend me low
FANO 361
Like him, and lay, like his, my hands together,
And lift them up to pray, and gently tether
Me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment's
spread?
If this was ever granted, I would rest
My head beneath thine, while thy healing hands
Close-covered both my eyes beside thy breast,
Pressing the brain, which too much thought ex-
pands,
Back to its proper size again, and smoothing
Distortion down till every nerve had soothing,
And all lay quiet, happy, and supprest.
How soon all worldly wrong would be repaired !
I think how I should view the earth and skies
And sea, when once again my brow was bared
After thy healing, with such different eyes.
O world, as God has made it ! all is beauty :
And knowing this, is love, and love is duty.
What further may be sought for or declared?
Guercino drew this angel I saw teach
(Alfred, dear friend) that little child to pray,
Holding the little hands up, each to each
Pressed gently, with his own head turned away
Over the earth where so much lay before him
Of work to do, though heaven was opening o'er
him,
And he was left at Fano by the beach.
362 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
We were at Fano, and three times we went
To sit and see him in his chapel there,
And drink his beauty to our soul's content,
My angel with me too; and since I care
For dear Guercino's fame (to which in power
And glory comes this picture for a dower,
Fraught with a pathos so magnificent) ,
And since he did not work so earnestly
At all times, and has else endured some wrong,
I took one thought his picture struck from me,
And spread it out, translating it to song.
My Love is here. Where are you, dear old friend?
How rolls the Wairoa at your world's far end ?
This is Ancona, yonder is the sea.
ROBERT BROWNING.
RIMINI
RIMINI
"THE land where I was born sits by the seas,
Upon that shore to which the Po descends,
With all his followers, in search of peace.
Love, which the gentle heart soon apprehends,
Seized him for the fair person which was ta'en
From me, and me even yet the mode offends.
Love, who to none beloved to love again
Remits, seized me with wish to please, so strong,
That, as thou seest, yet, yet it doth remain.
Love to one death conducted us along,
But Caina waits for him our life who ended" :
These were the accents uttered by her tongue.
Since I first listened to these souls offended,
I bowed my visage, and so kept it till
"What think'st thou?" said the bard; when I
unbended,
And recommenced: "Alas! unto such ill
How many sweet thoughts, what strong ecsta-
sies,
Led these their evil fortune to fulfil!"
And then I turned unto their side my eyes,
And said, "Francesca, thy sad destinies
Have made me sorrow till the tears arise.
364 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
But tell me, in the season of sweet sighs,
By what and how thy love to passion rose,
So as his dim desires to recognise?"
Then she to me : "The greatest of all woes
Is to remind us of our happy days
In misery, and that thy teacher knows.
But if to learn our passion's first root preys
Upon thy spirit with such sympathy,
I will do even as he who weeps and says.
We read one day for pastime, seated nigh,
Of Lancelot, how love enchained him too.
We were alone, quite unsuspiciously.
But oft our eyes met, and our cheeks in hue
All o'er discoloured by that reading were:
But one point only wholly us o'erthrew ;
When we read the long-sighed-f or smile of her,
To be thus kissed by such devoted lover,
He who from me can be divided ne'er
Kissed my mouth, trembling in the act all over.
Accursed was the book and he who wrote !
That day no further leaf we did uncover.
While thus one spirit told us of their lot,
The other wept, so that with pity's thralls
I swooned as if by death I had been smote,
And fell down even as a dead body falls."
DANTE.
Tr. Lord Byron.
RAVENNA
DANTE
DANTE am I, Minerva's son, who knew
With skill and genius (though in style obscure)
And elegance maternal to mature
My toil, a miracle to mortal view.
Through realms Tartarean and celestial flew
My lofty fancy, swift-winged and secure;
And ever shall my noble work endure,
Fit to be read of men, and angels too.
Florence my earthly mother's glorious name;
Step-dame to me, whom from her side she thrust,
Her duteous son: bear slanderous tongues the
blame ;
Ravenna housed my exile, holds my dust;
My spirit is with Him from whom it came,
A Parent envy cannot make unjust.
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO.
Tr. Francis C. Gray.
RAVENNA
OF all the cities in Romanian lands,
The chief, and most renowned, Ravenna stands,
Adorned in ancient times with arms and arts,
And rich inhabitants, with generous hearts.
JOHN DRYDEN.
365
366 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
RAVENNA
SWEET hour of twilight ! in the solitude
Of the pine forest, and the silent shore
Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood,
Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er
To where the last Caesarean fortress stood,
Evergreen forest ; which Boccaccio's lore
And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me,
How have I loved the twilight hour and thee !
The shrill cicalas, people of the pine,
Making their summer lives one ceaseless song,
Where the sole echoes, save my steed's and mine,
And vesper bells that rose the boughs along:
The specter huntsman of Onesti's line,
His hell-dogs and their chase, and the fair
throng
Which learned from this example not to fly
From a true lover, shadowed my mind's eye.
LORD BYRON.
RAVENNA
'Tis MORN, and never did a lovelier day
Salute Ravenna from its leafy bay:
For a warm eve and gentle rains at night
Have left a sparkling welcome for the light,
RAVENNA 367
And April, with his white hands wet with flowers,
Dazzles the bride-maids, looking from the towers :
Green vineyards and fair orchards, far and near,
Glitter with drops ; and heaven is sapphire clear,
And the lark rings it, and the pine-trees glow,
And odours from the citrons come and go,
And all the landscape earth and sky and sea
Breathes like a bright-eyed face, that laughs out
openly.
'T is nature full of spirits, waked and loved.
E'en sloth, to-day, goes quick and unreproved ;
For where's the living soul priest, minstrel,
clown,
Merchant, or lord that speeds not to tne town?
Hence happy faces, striking through the green
Of leafy roads, at every turn are seen ;
And the far ships, lifting their sails of white
Like joyful hands, come up with sca-ttered
light,
Come gleaming up, true to the wished-for day,
And chase the whistling brine, and swirl into the
bay.
LEIGH HUNT.
FERRARA
THE PRISON OF TASSO
FERRARA! in thy wide and grass-grown streets,
Whose symmetry was not for solitude,
There seems as 't were a curse upon the seats
Of former sovereigns, and the antique brood
Of Este, which for many an age made good
Its strength within thy walls, and was of yore
Patron or tyrant, as the changing mood
Of petty power impelled, of those who wore
The wreath which Dante's brow alone had worn
before.
And Tasso is their glory and their shame.
Hark to his strain ! and then survey his cell !
And see how dearly earned Torquato's fame,
And where Alfonso bade his poet dwell.
The miserable despot could not quell
The insulted mind he sought to quench, and
blend
With the surrounding maniacs, in the hell
Where he had plunged it. Glory without end
Scattered the clouds away, and on that name at-
tend
868
FERRARA 369
The tears and praises of all time, while thine
Would rot in its oblivion, in the sink
Of worthless dust which from thy boasted line
Is shaken into nothing ; but the link
Thou formest in his fortunes bids us think
Of thy poor malice, naming thee with scorn:
Alfonso, how thy ducal pageants shrink
From thee ! if in another station born,
Scarce fit to be the slave of him thou mad'st to
mourn :
Thou! formed to eat, and be despised, and die,
Even as the beasts that perish, save that thou
Hadst a more splendid trough and wider sty ;
He! with a glory round his furrowed brow,
Which emanated then, and dazzles now,
In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire,
And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow
No strain which shamed his country's creaking
lyre,
That whetstone of the teeth, monotony in wire!
Peace to Torquato's injured shade! 't was his
In life and death to be the mark where Wrong
Aimed with her poisoned arrows but to miss.
O victor unsurpassed in modern song!
Each year brings forth its millions; but how
long
The tide of generations shall roll on,
370 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And not the whole combined and countless
throng
Compose a mind like thine? Though all in one
Condensed their scattered rays, they would not
form a sun.
LORD BYRON.
TASSO'S DUNGEON
How MIGHT the goaded sufferer in his cell,
With nothing upon which his eyes might fall,
Except this vacant court, that dreary wall,
How might he live? I asked. Here doomed to
dwell,
I marvel how at all he could repel
Thoughts which to madness and despair would call.
Enter this vault ; the bare sight will appall
Thy spirit, even as mine within me fell,
Until I learned that wall not always there
Had stood, 't was something that this iron grate
Had once looked out upon a garden fair.
There must have been then here, to calm his brain.
Green leaves, and flowers, and sunshine; and a
weight
Fell from me, and my heart revived again.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH.
FEEEAEA 371
TO THE DUKE ALPHONSO, ASKING TO BE
LIBERATED
A NEW Ixion upon fortune's wheel,
Whether I sink profound, or rise sublime,
One never-ceasing martyrdom I feel,
The same in woe, though changing all the time.
I wept above, where sunbeams sport and climb
The vines, and through their foliage sighs the
breeze,
I burned and froze, languished, and prayed in
rhyme.
Nor could your ire, nor my own grief appease.
Now in my prison, deep and dim, have grown
My torments greater still and keener far,
As if all sharpened on the dungeon-stone:
Magnanimous Alphonso ! burst the bar,
Changing my fate, and not my cell alone,
And let my fortune wheel me where you are!
TOEQUATO TASSO.
Tr. Richard Henry Wilde.
ARQUA
PETRABCH'S TOMB
THEKE is a tomb in Arqua ; reared in air,
Pillared in their sarcophagus, repose
The bones of Laura's lover ; here repair
Many familiar with his well-sung woes,
The pilgrims of his genius. He arose
To raise a language, and his land reclaim
From the dull yoke of her barbaric foes ;
Watering the tree which bears his lady's name
With his melodious tears, he gave himself to fame.
They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died ;
The mountain-village where his latter days
Went down the vale of years; and 't is their
pride,
An honest pride, and let it be their praise,
To offer to the passing stranger's gaze
His- mansion and his sepulchre ; both plain
And venerably simple, such as raise
A feeling more accordant with his strain
Than if a pyramid formed his monumental fame.
372
ARQUA 373
And the soft hamlet where he dwelt
Is one of that complexion which seems made
For those who their mortality have felt,
And sought a refuge from their hopes decayed
In the deep umbrage of a green hill's shade,
Which shows a distant prospect far away
Of busy cities, now in vain displayed,
For they can lure no further ; and the ray
Of a bright sun can make sufficient holiday,
Developing the mountains, leaves, and flowers,
And shining in the brawling brook, whereby,
Clear as its current, glide the sauntering hours
With a calm languor, which, though to the eye
Idlesse it seem, hath its morality.
If from society we learn to live,
'T is solitude should teach us how to die;
It hath no flatterers ; vanity can give
hollow aid ; alone man with his God must strive.
LORD BYRON.
WRITTEN IN PETRARCH'S HOUSE
PETRARCH ! I would that there might be
In this thy household sanctuary
No visible monument of thee :
374 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
The fount that whilom played before thee,
The roof that rose in shelter o'er thee,
The low fair hills that still adore thee,
I would no more ; thy memory
Must loathe all cold reality,
Thought-worship only is for thee.
They say thy tomb lies there below ;
What want I with the marble show?
I am content, I will not go :
For though by poesy's high grace
Thou saw'st, in thy calm resting-place,
God, love, and nature face to face ;
Yet now that thou art wholly free,
How can it give delight to see
That sign of thy captivity?
LORD HOUGHTON.
PADUA
PADUA
ANTENOR, from the midst of Grecian hosts
Escaped, was able, safe, to penetrate
The Illyrian bay, and see the interior realms
Of the Liburni ; and to pass beyond
The source of the Timavus, issuing whence,
With a vast mountain murmur from nine springs,
A bursting flood goes forth, and on the fields
Crowds with resounding waters. Yet he here
Founded the walls of Padua, and built
The Trojan seats, and to the people gave
A name, and there affixed the arms of Troy.
Now, laid at rest, he sleeps in placid peace.
VIRGIL.
Tr. C. P. Cranch.
PADUA
PADTTA, thou within whose walls
Those mute guests at festivals,
Son and Mother, Death and Sin,
Played at dice for Ezzelin,
875
376 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Till Death cried, "I win, I win!"
And Sin cursed to lose the wager,
But Death promised, to assuage her,
That he would petition for
Her to be made Vice-Emperor,
When the destined years were o'er,
Over all between the Po
And the eastern Alpine snow,
Under the mighty Austrian.
Sin smiled so as Sin only can,
And since that time, ay, long before,
Both have ruled from shore to shore,
That incestuous pair, who follow
Tyrants as the sun the swallow,
As repentance follows crime,
And as changes follow time.
In thine halls the lamp of learning,
Padua, now no more is burning;
Like a meteor, whose wild way
Is lost over the grave of day,
It gleams betrayed and to betray :
Once remotest nations came
To adore that sacred flame,
When it lit not many a hearth
On this cold and gloomy earth ;
Now new fires from antique light
Spring beneath the wide world's might,
PADUA 377
But their spark lies dead in thee,
Trampled out by tyranny.
As the Norway woodman quells,
In the depth of tiny dells,
One light flame among the brakes,
While the boundless forest shakes,
And its mighty trunks are torn
By the fire thus lowly born;
The spark beneath his feet is dead,
He starts to see the flames it fed
Howling through the darkened sky
With myriad tongues victoriously,
And sinks down in fear ; so thou,
O tyranny, beholdest now
Light around thee, and thou hearest
The loud flames ascend, and f earest :
Grovel on the earth; ay, hide
In the dust thy purple pride !
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
VENICE
VENICE
I STOOD in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs ;
A palace and a prison on each hand :
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand ;
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying glory smiles
O'er the far times when many a subject land
Looked to the winged Lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hun-
dred isles !
She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers.
And such she was ; her daughters had their dow-
ers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Poured in her lap all gems in sparkling show-
ers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deemed their dignity in-
creased.
378
VENICE 379
In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone, but beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade, but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy !
But unto us she hath a spell beyond
Her name in story, and her long array
Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond
Above the Dogeless city's vanished sway :
Ours is a trophy which will not decay
With the Rialto ; Shylock and the Moor,
And Pierre, cannot be swept or worn away,
The keystones of the arch ! though all were o'er,
For us repeopled were the solitary shore.
The beings of the mind are not of clay ;
Essentially immortal, they create
And multiply in us a brighter ray
And more beloved existence : that which Fate
Prohibits to dull life, in this our state
Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied,
First exiles, then replaces what we hate ;
Watering the heart whose early flowers have died,
And with a fresher growth replenishing the void.
380 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
The spouseless Adriatic mourns her lord;
And, annual marriage now no more renewed,
The Bucentaur lies rotting unrestored,
Neglected garment of her widowhood!
St. Mark yet sees his lion where he stood
Stand, but in mockery of his withered power,
Over the proud place where an emperor sued,
And monarchs gazed and envied in the hour
When Venice was a queen with an unequalled dower.
The Suabian sued, and now the Austrian
reigns,
An emperor tramples where an emperor knelt;
Kingdoms are shrunk to provinces, and chains
Clank over sceptered cities ; nations melt
From power's high pinnacle, when they have
felt
The sunshine for a while, and downward go
Like lauwine loosened from the mountain's belt :
O for one hour of blind old Dandolo !
The octogenarian chief, Byzantium's conquering
foe.
Before St. Mark still glow his steeds of brass,
Their gilded collars glittering in the sun;
But is not Doria's menace come to pass?
Are they not bridled? Venice, lost and won,
Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done,
Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence she rose!
VENICE 381
Better be whelmed beneath the waves, and shun,
Even in destruction's depth, her foreign foes,
From whom submission wrings an infamous repose.
In youth she was all glory, a new Tyre,
Her very byword sprung from victory,
The "Planter of the Lion," which through fire
And blood she bore o'er subject earth and sea;
Though making many slaves, herself still free,
And Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite :
Witness Troy's rival, Candia ! Vouch it, ye
Immortal waves that saw Lepanto's fight!
For ye are names no time nor tyranny can blight.
I loved her from my boyhood, she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart,
Rising like water-columns from the sea,
Of joy the sojourn and of wealth the mart;
And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare's
art,
Had stamped her image in me, and even so,
Although I found her thus, we did not part,
Perchance even dearer in her day of woe
Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.
I can repeople with the past, and of
The present there is still for eye and thought,
And meditation chastened down, enough;
And more, it may be, than I hoped or sought ;
388 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And of the happiest moments which were
wrought
Within the web of my existence, some
From thee, fair Venice! have their colours
caught ;
There are some feelings time cannot benumb ;
Nor torture shake, or mine would now be cold and
dumb. LORD BYRON.
THE CARNIVAL
Or ALL the places where the Carnival
Was most facetious in the days of yore,
For dance, and song, and serenade, and ball,
And masque, and mime, and mystery, and more
Than I have time to tell now, or at all,
Venice the bell from every city bore ;
And at the moment when I fix my story
That sea-born city was in all her glory.
They've pretty faces yet, those same Venetians,
Black eyes, arched brows, and sweet expressions
. still;
Such as of old were copied from the Grecians,
In ancient arts by moderns mimicked ill;
And like so many Venuses of Titian's
(The best's at Florence, see it, if ye will),
VENICE 385
They look when leaning over the balcony,
Or stepped from out a picture by Giorgione,
Whose tints are truth and beauty at their best ;
And when you to Manf rim's palace go,
That picture (howsoever fine the rest)
Is loveliest to my mind of all the show:
It may perhaps be also to your zest,
And that's the cause I rhyme upon it so :
'T is but a portrait of his son, and wife,
And self ; but such a woman ! love in life !
LORD BYRON.
DUCAL PALACE
I SPEAK to time and to Eternity,
Of which I grow a portion, not to man.
Ye elements ! in which to be resolved
I hasten, let my voice be as a spirit
Upon you ! Ye blue waves ! which bore my banner,
Ye winds ! which fluttered o'er as if you loved it,
And filled my swelling sails as they were wafted
To many a triumph ! Thou, my native earth,
Which I have bled for, and thou foreign earth,
Which drank this willing blood from many a
wound !
Ye stones, in which my gore will not sink, but
Reek up to Heaven! Ye skies, which will receive
it!
384 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Thou sun ! which shinest on these things, and thou !
Who kindlest and who quenchest suns ! Attest !
I am not innocent, but are these guiltless ?
I perish, but not unavenged ; far ages
Float up from the abyss of time to be,
And show these eyes, before they close, the doom
Of this proud city, and I leave my curse
On her and hers forever ! Yes, the hours
Are silently engendering of the day,
When she, who built 'gainst Attila a bulwark,
Shall yield, and bloodlessly and basely yield
Unto a bastard Attila, without
Shedding so much blood in her last defence
As these old veins, oft drained in shielding her,
Shall pour in sacrifice. She shall be bought
And sold, and be an appanage to those
Who shall despise her ! She shall stoop to be
A province for an empire, petty town
In lieu of capital, with slaves for senates,
Beggars for nobles, panders for a people!
Then with the Hebrew in thy palaces,
The Hun in thy high places, and the Greek
Walks o'er thy mart, and smiles on it for his !
When thy patricians beg their bitter bread
In narrow streets, and in their shameful need
Make their nobility a plea for pity !
LORD BYRON.
VENICE 385
VENICE
SUN-GIRT city ! thou hast been
Ocean's child, and then his queen ;
Now is come a darker day,
And thou soon must be his prey,
If the power that raised thee here
Hallow so thy watery bier,
A less drear ruin then than now,
With thy conquest-branded brow
Stooping to the slave of slaves
From thy throne, among the waves
Wilt thou be, when the sea-mew
Flies, as once before it flew,
O'er thine isles depopulate,
And all is in its ancient state,
Save where many a palace-gate
With green sea-flowers overgrown
Like a rock of ocean's own,
Topples o'er the abandoned sea
As the tides change sullenly.
The fisher on his watery way,
Wandering at the close of day,
Will spread his sail and seize his oar
Till he pass the gloomy shore,
Lest thy dead should, from their sleep
Bursting o'er the starlight deep,
Lead a rapid masque of death
O'er the waters of his path.
386 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Those who alone thy towers behold
Quivering through aerial gold,
As I now behold them here,
Would imagine not they were
Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourished worms,
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering;
But if Freedom should awake
In her omnipotence, and shake
From the Celtic anarch's hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chained like thee, ingloriously,
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With new virtues more sublime ;
If not, perish thou and they,
Clouds which stain truth's rising day
By her sun consumed away,
Earth can spare ye: while like flowers,
In the waste of years and hours,
From your dust new nations spring
With more kindly blossoming.
Perish! let there only be
Floating o'er thy hearthless sea,
As the garment of thy sky
Clothes the world immortally,
VENICE 387
One remembrance, more sublime
Than the tattered pall of Time,
Which scarce hides thy visage wan.
That a tempest-cleaving swan
Of the songs of Albion,
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee ; and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion
That its joy grew his, and sprung
From his lips like music flung
O'er a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror ; what though yet
Poesy's unfailing river,
Which through Albion winds forever,
Lashing with melodious wave
Many a sacred poet's grave,
Mourn its latest nursling fled!
What though thou with all thy dead
Scarce can for this fame repay
Aught thine own, O, rather say,
Though thy sins and slaveries foul
Overcloud a sunlike soul!
As the ghost of Homer clings
Round Scamander's wasting springs ;
As divinest Shakespeare's might
Fills Avon and the world with light,
Like omniscient power, which he
Imaged mid mortality;
388 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
As the love from Petrarch's urn
Yet amid yon hills doth burn,
A quenchless lamp, by which the heart
Sees things unearthly: so thou art,
Mighty spirit; so shall be
The city that did refuge thee.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
AT VENICE
IN THE PIAZZA AT NIGHT
O BEAUTIFUL beneath the magic moon
To walk the watery way of palaces !
O beautiful, o'er-vaulted with gemmed blue,
This spacious court! with colour and with gold,
With cupolas and pinnacles and points
And crosses multiplex and tips and balls
(Wherewith the bright stars unreproving mix,
Nor scorn by hasty eyes to be confused) ;
Fantastically perfect this lone pile
Of Oriental glory ; these long ranges
Of classic chiselling ; this gay flickering crowd,
And the calm Campanile, beautiful !
O, beautiful!
My mind is in her rest ; my heart at home
In all around ; my soul secure in place,
And the vext needle perfect to her poles.
VENICE 389
Aimless and hopeless in my life, I seemed
To thread the winding by-ways of the town
Bewildered, baffled, hurried hence and thence,
All at cross purpose ever with myself,
Unknowing whence or whither. Then, at once,
At a step, I crown the Campanile's top,
And view all mapped below; islands, lagoon,
An hundred steeples, and a myriad roofs,
The fruitful champaign, and the cloud-cap t Alps.
And the broad Adriatic.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
THE PIAZZA OF ST. MARK AT MIDNIGHT
HUSHED is the music, hushed the hum of voices ;
Gone is the crowd of dusky promenaders,
Slender- waisted, almond-eyed Venetians,
Princes and paupers. Not a single footfall
Sounds in the arches of the Procuratie.
One after one, like sparks in cindered paper,
Faded the lights out in the goldsmiths' windows.
Drenched with the moonlight lies the still Piazza.
Fair as the palace builded for Aladdin,
Yonder St. Mark uplifts its sculptured splen-
dour,
390 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Intricate fretwork, Byzantine mosaic,
Colour on colour, column upon column,
Barbaric, wonderful, a thing to kneel to !
Over the portal stand the four gilt horses,
Gilt hoof in air, and wide distended nostril,
Fiery, untamed, as in the days of Nero.
Skyward, a cloud of domes and spires and crosses ;
Earthward, black shadows flung from jutting
stone-work.
High over all the slender Campanile
Quivers, and seems a falling shaft of silver !
Hushed is the music, hushed the hum of voices.
From coigne and cornice and fantastic gargoyle,
At intervals the moan of dove or pigeon,
Fairily faint, floats off into the moonlight.
This, and the murmur of the Adriatic,
Lazily restless, lapping the mossed marble,
Staircase or buttress, scarcely break the stillness.
Deeper each moment seems to grow the silence,
Denser the moonlight in the still Piazza.
Hark ! on the Tower above the ancient gateway,
The twin bronze Vulcans, with their ponderous
hammers,
Hammer the midnight on their brazen bell there!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.
VENICE 391
SAINT CHRISTOPHER
IN THE narrow Venetian street,
On the wall above the garden gate
(Within the breath of the rose is sweet,
And the nightingale sings there, soon and late),
Stands Saint Christopher, carven in stone,
With the little child in his huge caress,
And the arms of the baby Jesus thrown
About his gigantic tenderness;
And over the wall a wandering growth
Of darkest and greenest ivy clings,
And climbs around them, and holds them both
In its netted clasp of knots and rings,
Clothing the saint from foot to beard
In glittering leaves that whisper and dance
To the child, on his mighty arm upreared,
With a lusty summer exuberance.
To the child on his arm the faithful saint
Looks up with a broad and tranquil joy;
Plis brows and his heavy beard aslant
Under the dimpled chin of the boy,
Who plays with the world upon his palm,
And bends his smiling looks divine
On the face of the giant mild and calm,
And the glittering frolic of the vine.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
He smiles on either with equal grace,
On the simple ivy's unconscious life,
And the soul in the giant's lifted face,
Strong from the peril of the strife :
For both are his own, the innocence
That climbs from the heart of earth to heaven,
And the virtue that greatly rises thence
Through trial sent and victory given.
Grow, ivy, up to his countenance,
But it cannot smile on my life as on thine ;
Look, Saint, with thy trustful, fearless glance,
Where I dare not lift these eyes of mine.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.
TO VENICE
To THE much-desired Venice
My thoughts fly with longing
When, in the clouded night,
My painful feelings
Are oppressed by bitter regret.
Thus the bird wounded
By a venomous serpent
Flies, flies, till wearied out,
And, deadened, drops
Beside its flowery nest.
VENICE 393
most magnificent Venice!
Whoever has been able to taste
The sweetness of love
Amid thy life of poesy
For eternity will not forget thee !
1 love thee in thy desolation,
In thy vestment of mourning;
And in thy gondolas
Which lose themselves among the canals,
Like an uncompleted dream.
I love thee with fervent regret,
For thy beautiful Past,
And for the reminiscences
Of the sacred love,
And of the being I have lost.
ALEKSANDRI.
Tr. Henry Stanley.
THE GONDOLA
TILTS the gondola lightly over the wave like a
cradle,
And the chest thereupon me of a coffin reminds.
Just so we, 'twixt cradle and coffin, go tilting and
floating
On Time's larger canal carelessly on through our
life. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE.
Tr. J. S. Dwight.
394? THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
SUNRISE IN VENICE
NIGHT seems troubled and scarce asleep ;
Her brows are gathered in broken rest;
Sullen old lion of grand St. Mark
Lordeth and lifteth his front from the dark,
And a star in the east starts up from the deep,
White as my lilies that grow in the west ;
And the day leaps up with a star on his breast.
Hist ! men are passing hurriedly.
I see the yellow wide wings of a bark
Sail silently over my morning-star.
I see men move in the moving dark,
Tall and silent as columns are,
Great sinewy men that are good to see,
With hair pushed back and with open breasts ;
Barefooted fishermen seeking their boats,
Brown as walnuts and hairy as goats,
Brave old water-dogs, wed to the sea,
First to their labours and last to their rests.
Ships are moving. I hear a horn ;
A silver trumpet it sounds to me,
Deep-voiced and musical, far a-sea
Answers back, and again it calls.
'T is the sentinel-boats that watch the town
VENICE 395
All night, as mounting her watery walls,
And watching for pirate or smuggler. Down
Over the sea, and reaching away,
And against the east, a soft light falls,
Silvery soft as the mist of morn,
And I catch a breath like the breath of day.
The east is blooming! Yea, a rose,
Vast as the heavens, soft as a kiss,
Sweet as the presence of woman is,
Rises and reaches and widens and grows
Right out of the sea, as a blooming tree;
Richer and richer, so higher and higher,
Deeper and deeper it takes its hue;
Brighter and brighter it reaches through
The space of heaven and the place of stars,
Till all is as rich as a rose can be,
And my rose-leaves fall into billows of fire.
Then beams reach upward as arms from a sea ;
Then lances and arrows are aimed at me.
Then lances and spangles and spars and bars
Are broken and shivered and strewn on the sea ;
And around and about me tower and spire
Start from the billows like tongues of fire.
JOAQUIN MILLER.
396 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S
O, GALUPPI, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find !
I can hardly misconceive you ; it would prove me
deaf and blind ;
But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a
heavy mind !
Here you come with your old music, and here's all
the good it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the
merchants were the kings,
Where St. Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed
the sea with rings?
Ay, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis
arch'd by ... what you call . . .
Shylock's bridge with houses on it, where they kept
the carnival:
I was never out of England it's as if I saw it all !
Did young people take their pleasure when the sea
was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever
to mid-day
When they made up fresh adventures for the mor-
row, do you say?
VENICE 397
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips
so red,
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-
flower on its bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man
might base his head?
Well, (and it was graceful of them) they'd break
talk off and afford
She, to bite her mask's black velvet; he, to finger
on his sword,
While you sat and play'd Toccatas, stately at the
clavichord?
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths di-
minish'd, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those
solutions 'Must we die?'
Those commiserating sevenths 'Life might last!
we can but try!'
'Were you happy ?' 'Yes.' 'And are you still as
happy?' 'Yes. And you?'
'Then, more kisses !' 'Did / stop them, when a
million seem'd so few?'
Hark! the dominant's persistence, till it must be
answer'd to!
So an octave struck the answer. O, they praised
you, I dare say!
398 THKOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
'Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at
grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking, when I hear a mas-
ter play. 5
Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due
time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with
deeds as well undone,
Death came tacitly and took them where they
never see the sun.
But when I sit down to reason, think to take my
stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's
close reserve,
In you come with your cold music, till I creep
through every nerve.
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where
a house was burn'd
'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent
what Venice earn'd!
The soul, doubtless, is immortal where a soul can
be discern'd.
'Yours for instance, you know physics, something
of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in
their degree;
VENICE 399
Butterflies may dread extinction, you'll not die,
it cannot be!
'As for Venice and its people, merely born to
bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and
folly were the crop;
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing
had to stop?
'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want
the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too what's be-
come of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel
chilly and grown old.
ROBERT BROWNING.
VENICE
ON rosy Venice' breast
The gondola's at rest ;
No fisher is in sight,
Not a light.
Lone seated on the strand,
Uplifts the lion grand
His foot of bronze on high
Against the sky.
400 THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
As if with resting wing
Like herons in a ring,
Vessels and shallops keep,
Their quiet sleep
Upon the vapoury bay;
And when the light winds play,
Their pennons, lately whist,
Cross in the mist.
The moon is now concealed,
And now but half revealed,
Veiling her face so pale
With starry veil.
In convent of Sainte-Croix
Thus doth the abbess draw
Her ample-folded cape
Round her fair shape.
The palace of the knight,
The staircases so white,
The solemn porticos
Are in repose.
Each bridge and thoroughfare
The gloomy statues there,
The gulf which trembles so
When the winds blow,
VENICE 401
All still, save guards who pace,
With halberds long, their space,
Watching the battled walls
Of arsenals.
ALFRED DE MUSSET.
Tr. C. F. Bates.
VENICE
WHITE swan of cities, slumbering in thy nest
So wonderfully built among the reeds
Of the lagoon, that fences thee and feeds,
As sayeth thy old historian and thy guest!
White water-lily, cradled and caressed
By ocean streams, and from the silt and weeds
Lifting thy golden pistils with their seeds,
Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest !
White phantom city, whose untrodden streets
Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting
Shadows of palaces and strips of sky ;
I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets
Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting
In air their unsubstantial masonry.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
408 THBOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
VENETIAN SUNRISE
How OFTEN have I now outwatched the night
Alone in this grey chamber toward the sea
Turning its deep-arcaded balcony !
Round yonder sharp acanthus-leaves the light
Comes stealing, red at first, then golden bright ;
Till when the day-god in his strength and glee
Springs from the orient flood victoriously,
Each cusp is tipped and tongued with quivering
white.
The islands that were blots of purple bloom,
Now tremble in soft liquid luminous haze,
Uplifted from the sea-floor to the skies;
And dim discerned erewhile through roseate gloom,
A score of sails now stud the waterways,
Ruffling like swans afloat from paradise.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS,
VENICE
VENICE, thou Siren of sea-cities, wrought
By mirage, built on water, stair o'er stair,
Of sunbeams and cloud-shadows, phantom-fair,
With naught of earth to mar thy sea-born
thought !
>
VENICE 403
Thou floating film upon the wonder-fraught
Ocean of dreams ! Thou hast no dream so rare
As are thy sons and daughters, they who wear
Foam-flakes of charm from thine enchantment
caught !
O dark brown eyes ! O tangles of dark hair !
O heaven-blue eyes, blonde tresses where the breeze
Plays over sun-burn'd cheeks in sea-blown air !
Firm limbs of moulded bronze ! frank debonair
Smiles of deep-bosom'd women ! Loves that seize
Man's soul, and waft her on storm-melodies !
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
FROM "LOVE IN ITALY"
"TRUE love should overwhelm the Muse's power ;'
This, then, was thy rebuke one glorious night
When we were last in Venice. All the while
Were silent answers wafted from the isle
That holds the Adriatic tide at bay ;
Which, else, would at the ebb breed slow decay
Where now is life and beauty; at its height
Would deluge all. No city then would rise
To smile in palace, pinnacle, and tower
And calm reflections of unclouded skies.
404} THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Art is the lover's Lido: passion's rage,
Fierce to destroy, by Beauty's wise control
Works for the world a wondrous heritage,
Immortal types of the immortal Soul.
JOHN HAKL INGHAM,
IN THE SMALL CANALS
Love, felt from far, long sought, scarce found,
On thee I call ;
Here where with silvery silent sound
The smooth oars fall ;
Here where the glimmering water-ways,
Above yon stair,
Mirror one trembling lamp that plays
In twilight air!
What sights, what sounds, O poignant Love,
Ere thou wert flown,
Quivered these darksome waves above,
In darkness known !
I dare not dream thereof ; the sting
Of those dead eyes
Is too acute and close a thing
For one who dies.
VENICE 405
Only I feel through glare and gloom,
Where yon lamp falls,
Dim spectres hurrying to their doom,
And Love's voice calls:
'Twas better thus toward death to glide,
Soul-full of bliss,
Than with long life unsatisfied
Life's crown to miss.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
A MASQUE OF VENICE
(A DREAM)
NOT a stain,
IN the sun-brimmed sapphire cup that is the sky-
Not a ripple on the black translucent lane
Of the palace-walled lagoon.
Not a cry
As the gondoliers with velvet oar glide by,
Through the golden afternoon.
From this height,
Where the carved, age-yellowed balcony o'er juts
Yonder liquid, marble pavement, see the light
Shimmer soft beneath the bridge
That abuts
406 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
On a labyrinth of water-ways and shuts
Half their sky off with its ridge.
We shall mark
All the pageant from this ivory porch of ours,
Masques and jesters, mimes and minstrels, while
we hark
To their music as they fare,
Scent their flowers
Flung from boat to boat in rainbow radiant
showers
Through the laughter-ringing air.
See! they come,
Like a flock of serpent-throated, black-plumed
swans,
With the mandoline, the viol, and the drum,
Gems afire on arms ungloved,
Fluttering fans,
Floating mantles like a great moth's streaky vans
Such as Veronese loved.
But behold
In their midst a white unruffled swan appears.
One strange barge that snowy tapestries enfold,
White its tasseled, silver prow.
Who is here?
Prince of Love in masquerade or Prince of Fear,
Clad in glittering silken snow?
VENICE 407
Cheek and chin
Where the mask's edge stops are of the hoar-
frost's hue,
And no eyebeams seem to sparkle from within
Where the hollow rings have place.
Yon gay crew
Seem to fly with him, he seems ever to pursue.
'Tis our sport to watch the race.
At his side
Stands the goldenest of beauties ; from her glance,
From her forehead, shines the splendour of a
bride,
And her feet seem shod with wings
To entrance,
For she leaps into a wild and rhythmic dance,
Like Salome at the King's.
'Tis his aim
Just to hold, to clasp her once against his breast,
Hers to flee him, to elude him in the game.
Ah, she fears him overmuch !
Is it jest
Is it earnest? a strange riddle lurks half -guessed
In her horror of his touch.
For each time
That his snow-white fingers reach her, fades some
ray
408 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
From the glory of her beauty in its prime ;
And the knowledge grows upon us that the dance
Is no play
'Twixt the pale, mysterious lover and the fay
But the whirl of fate and chance.
Where the tide
Of the broad lagoon sinks plumb into the sea,
There the mystic gondolier hath won his bride.
Hark, one helpless, stifled scream!
Must it be?
Mimes and minstrels, flowers and music, where are
ye? ^
Was all Venice such a dream ?
EMMA LAZARUS.
THE DECAY OF VENICE
THE glowing pageant of my story lies,
A shaft of light, across the stormy years,
WTien, 'mid the agony of blood and tears,
Or pope or kaiser won the mournful prize,
Till I, the fearless child of ocean, heard
The step of doom, and trembling to my fall,
Remorseful knew that I had seen unstirred
Proud Freedom's death, the tyrant's festival ;
VENICE 409
Whilst that Italia which was yet to be,
And is, and shall be, sat, a virgin pure,
High over Umbria on the mountain slopes,
And saw the failing fires of liberty
Fade on the chosen shrine she deemed secure,
When died for many a year man's noblest hopes.
SILAS WEIR MITCHELL.
VENETIAN NIGHT
HER eyes in the darkness shone, in the twilight
shed
By the gondola bent like the darkness over her
head.
Softly the gondola rocked, lights came and went;
A white glove shone as her black fan lifted and
leant
Where the silk of her dress, the blue of a bittern's
wing,
Rustled against my knee, and, murmuring
The sweet slow hesitant English of a child,
Her voice was articulate laughter, her soul smiled.
Softly the gondola rocked, lights came and went ;
From the sleeping houses a shadow of slumber
leant
Over our roads like a wing, and the dim lagoon,
Rustling with silence, slumbered under the moon.
410 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Softly the gondola rocked, and a pale light came
Over the waters, mild as a silver flame ;
She lay back, thrilling with smiles, in the twilight
shed
By the gondola bent like the darkness over her
head;
I saw her eyes shine subtly, then close awhile :
I remember her silence, and, in the night, her smile.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
DAWN AT VENICE
ONE burnished cloud first turned a jagged prow-
The waking water nestled deep among
Her murky gondolas, that bow, on bow
Freighted with shadows at the molo swung.
Soon palace and canal paled into sight,
Fainting as watchers whose long vigil wanes ;
Till Dawn's approach across the waves of night
Flushed the rose blood in sleeping Venice 5 veins.
Then up the dazzling steps that lead to God,
One radiant sunbeam and a lone white dove
Santa Maria's holy threshold trod,
A shrine of morning lit by Light and Love!
VENICE 411
Loud warned the chime to mass o'er quay and
home,
Calling soft flocks of doves to greet the day
'Mid sculptured saints and angels round the dome
While market-women followed in to pray.
MARTHA GILBERT DICKINSON.
VENICE
OUT of the land and in the sea,
Venice is all the world to me.
All is quaint and queer and quiet,
Naught of trade's annoying riot ;
Neigh of nag and noise of car
From this region banished are;
Only horses of Saint Mark,
Motionless in metal dark ;
Harmless necessary cat
Dodges not the fell brickbat;
Here no curs disturb our ease.
Nor communicate their fleas ;
Naught is heard but roar of tongue
Gay and careless crowds among,
And the clangs of bells at night,
Ringing till the east is bright,
And the tinkle of guitar
THEOUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
To the sound of voices far,
In the amorous serenade
Under latticed window played.
Crooked, stony, filthy alleys,
Black and graceful darting galleys,
Boatmen chaffing, swearing, steering
With a skill no danger fearing ;
Every colour under heaven,
Rivaling the rainbow seven,
On the stone or stuccoed walls
When the slanting sunshine falls ;
Or forbidding shadows lurk
In the alleys, somber, murk,
Or the bashful, crescent moon,
Ripening into roundness soon,
Lights the water's gentle ripple
Which the evening breezes stipple.
* + *
Windows showing shell and coral,
Prints of ballet girls immoral,
Antique paintings made to order,
Cotton scarfs with gorgeous border,
Silver filigree and paste,
Fan*s for every age and taste,
Ivories in rare devices
Which they sell for twenty prices,
Glass of every form and hue
Which the ancient workmen blew.
VENICE
If a letter one should ask, it
Mounts by means of cord or basket,
Saving postman flights of stairs
While he minds his own affairs.
Water-babies here abound,
In canals retired found ;
To a floating board they cling
Tethered by the mother's string.
Beggar, dirty, picturesque, so
Lazy slumbering al fresco;
Though his last of coin is spent, he
Feels the dolce far niente,
Dreading water without doubt,
Administered inside or out ;
He, as cicerone, tells
Horrors of the dungeon cells
Underneath the Bridge of Sighs,
Opening the tourists' eyes ;
Warbling as he points the scene
Of the deadly guillotine,
Or the hole where Byron slept,
And where better men have wept.
* * * *
In the spacious council chamber
I on mental ladder clamber,
And with due historic halo
Restore the face of Faliero ;
And when no spectator's by,
414 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
In the lion's jaw I shy
Denunciation to the State
Of my landlord whom I hate.
Or in dreams, if funds are low,
I to the Rialto go,
Where good Shylock lends to me
An old clo' security;
While he's sorting out the heap
I at Jessica take a peep ;
Or at palace window high,
As I lazily float by,
See the Desdemona blond,
With pathetic glances fond,
Waving 'kerchief to the Moor
As he slams the great front door.
Though no more thy ship of state,
With doges on her decks who wait,
Rules the sea with wedding-ring
And maidens orange garlands bring ;
Though the Lion of Saint Mark,
Cracked and weather-stained and dark,
From his column has descended,
His despotic sway long ended,
Teeth well filed and claws close grated,
Roar, like Bottom's, mitigated,
Tucked by keepers in museum,
Can't be seen unless we fee 'em ;
Fortune, tiptoe on the world,
VENICE 415
Let my sails be ever furled
Near thy shrine ; here let my eyes
Gaze in ever new surprise;
While the breaker constant combs
View thy palaces and domes
Which against the sunset sky
Into sudden darkness die.
Fallen mistress of the sea,
Let me cast my lot with thee !
Far from earth, down in the sea,
Venice, thou art the land for me !
IRVING BROWNE.
ON THE ZATTERE
ONLY to live, only to be
In Venice, is enough for me.
To be a beggar, and to lie
At home beneath the equal sky,
To feel the sun, to drink the night,
Had been enough for my delight ;
Happy because the sun allowed
The luxury of being proud
Not to some only ; but to all
The right to lie along the wall.
Here my ambition dies ; I ask
416 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
No more than some half -idle task,
To be done idly, and to fill
Some gaps of leisure when I will.
I care not if the world forget
That it was ever in my debt ;
I care not where its prizes fall ;
I long for nothing, having all.
The sun, each morning, on his way,
Calls for me at the Zattere ;
I wake and greet him, I go out,
Meet him, and follow him about;
We spend the day together, he
Goes to bed early ; as for me,
I make the moon my mistress, prove
Constant to my inconstant love.
For she is coy with me, will hie
To my arms amorously, and fly
Ere I have kissed her ; ah ! but she,
She it is, to eternity,
I adore only ; and her smile
Bewilders the enchanted isle
To more celestial magic, glows
At once the crystal and the rose.
The crazy lover of the moon,
I hold her, on the still lagoon,
Sometimes I hold her in my arms ;
'Tis her cold silver kiss that warms
My blood to singing, and puts fire
Into the heart of my desire.
VENICE 417
And all desire in Venice dies
To such diviner lunacies ;
Life dreams itself ; the world goes on,
Oblivious, in oblivion;
Life dreams itself, content to keep
Happy immortally, in sleep.
AETHUR SYMONS.
VENETA MARINA
THE masts rise white to the stars,
White on the night of the sky,
Out of the water's night,
And the stars lean down to them white.
Ah! how the stars seem nigh;
How far away are the stars !
r
And I, too, under the stars,
Alone with the night again,
And the water's monotone ;
I and the night alone,
And the world and the ways of men
Farther from me than the stars.
ABTHUB SYMONS.
418 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
AT THE DOGANA
NIGHT, and the silence of the night,
In Venice ; far away, a song ;
As if the lyric water made
Itself a serenade ;
As if the water's silence were a song
Sent up into the night.
Night, a more perfect day,
A day of shadows luminous,
Water and sky at one, at one with us ;
As if the very peace of night,
The older peace than heaven or light,
Came down into the day.
ARTHUR SYMONS,
ON THE LIDO
ON her still lake the city sits
While bark and boat beside her flits,
Nor hears, her soft siesta taking,
The Adriatic billows breaking.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
VENICE 419
LIDO
I RODE one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice : a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this, an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons ; and no other ob j ect breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where 't was our wont to ride while day went
down.
This ride was my delight. I love all waste
And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be;
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows : and yet more
Than all, with a remembered friend I love
To ride as then I rode ; for the winds drove
The living spray along the sunny air
Into our faces ; the blue heavens were bare,
Stripped to their depths by the awakening north;
And from the waves sound like delight broke forth
420 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
Harmonising with solitude, and sent
Into our hearts aerial merriment.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
THE JEWS' CEMETERY
LIDO OF VENICE
A TRACT of land swept by the salt sea-foam,
Fringed with acacia flowers, and billowy deep
In meadow-grasses, where tall poppies sleep,
And bees athirst for wilding honey roam.
How many a bleeding heart hath found its home
Under these hillocks which the sea-mews sweep !
Here knelt an outcast race to curse and weep,
Age after age, 'neath heaven's unanswering dome.
Sad is the place, and solemn. Grave by grave,
Lost in the dunes, with rank weeds overgrown,
Pines in abandonment ; as though unknown,
Uncared for, lay the dead, whose records pave
This path neglected ; each forgotten stone
Wept by no mourner but the moaning wave.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
TORCELLO
TORCELLO
SHORT sail from Venice sad Torcello lies,
Deserted island, low and still and green.
Before fair Venice was a bride and queen
Torcello's court was held in fairer guise
Than Doges knew. To-day death-vapours rise
From fields where once her palaces were seen,
And in her silent towers that crumbling lean
Unterrified the brooding swallow flies.
once-loved friend, who dost in vain implore
My presence, thou art like Torcello's land.
Thy wasted life to me seems life no more.
With all its beauty death goes hand in hand,
1 shrink from thee, as on its blighted strand
Torcello's ghosts might turn and fly the shore.
HELEN HUNT.
421
ASOLO
BROWNING AT ASOLO
THIS is the loggia Browning loved,
High on the flank of the friendly town ;
These are the hills that his keen eye roved,
The green like a cataract leaping down
To the plain that his pen gave new renown.
There to the West what a range of blue !
The very background Titian drew
To his peerless Loves. O tranquil scene !
Who than thy poet f ondlier knew
The peaks and the shore and the lore between ?
See! yonder's his Venice the valiant Spire,
Highest one of the perfect three,
Guarding the others : the Palace choir,
The Temple flashing with opal fire
Bubble and foam of the sunlit sea.
Yesterday he was part of it all
Sat here, discerning cloud from snow
In the flush of the Alpine afterglow,
Or mused on the vineyard whose wine-stirred
row
Meets in a leafy bacchanal.
ASOLO
Listen a moment how oft did he!
To the bells from Fontalto's distant tower
Leading the evening in ... ah, me !
Here breathes the whole soul of Italy
As one rose breathes with the breath of the
bower.
Sighs were meant for an hour like this,
When joy is keen as a thrust of pain.
Do you wonder the poet's heart would miss
This touch of rapture in Nature's kiss,
And dream of Asolo over again?
"Part of it yesterday," we moan ?
Nay, he is part of it now, no fear.
What most we love we are that alone.
His body lies under the Minster stone,
But the love of the warm heart lingers here.
ROBEET UNDERWOOD JOHNSON.
FAREWELL TO ITALY
LINES ON LEAVING ITALY
ONCE more among the old gigantic hills
With vapours clouded o'er;
The vales of Lombardy grow dim behind,
The rocks ascend before.
They beckon me, the giants, from afar,
They wing my footsteps on ;
Their helms of ice, their plumage of the pine,
Their cuirasses of stone.
My heart beats high, my breath comes freer
forth,
Why should my heart be sore?
I hear the eagle's and the vulture's cry,
The nightingale's no more.
Where is the laurel, where the myrtle's blossom?
Bleak is the path around:
Where from the thicket comes the ringdove's coo-
ing?
Hoarse is the torrent's sound.
424
FAREWELL TO ITALY
Yet should I grieve, when from my loaded bosom
A weight appears to flow?
Methinks the Muses come to call me home
From yonder rocks of snow.
I know not how, but in yon land of roses
My heart was heavy still,
I startled at the warbling nightingale,
The zephyr on the hill.
They said the stars shone with a softer gleam,
It seemed not so to me;
In vain a scene of beauty beamed around,
My thoughts were o'er the sea.
ADAM GOTTLOB OEHLENSCHLAGER.
Tr. Anon.
FAREWELL TO ITALY
I LEAVE thee, beauteous Italy ! no more
From the high terraces, at even-tide,
To look supine into thy depths of sky,
Thy golden moon between the cliff and me,
Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses
Bordering the channel of the milky way.
Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams
Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico
Murmur to me but in the poet's song.
426 THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
I did believe (what have I not believ'd?),
Weary with age, but unoppress'd by pain,
To close in thy soft clime my quiet day
And rest my bones in the mimosa's shade.
Hope ! Hope ! few ever cherish'd thee so little ;
Few are the heads thou hast so rarely rais'd;
But thou didst promise this, and all was well.
For we were fond of thinking where to lie
When every pulse hath ceas'd, when the lone heart
Can lift no aspiration reasoning
As if the sight were unimpair'd by death,
Were unobstructed by the coffin-lid,
And the sun cheer 'd corruption ! Over all
The smiles of Nature shed a potent charm,
And light us to our chamber at the grave.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
FAREWELL TO ITALY
WE lingered at Domo d'Ossola
Like a last, reluctant guest
Where the gray-green tide of Italy
Flows up to a snowy crest.
The world from that Alpine shoulder
Yearns toward the Lombard plain
The hearts that come, with rapture,
The hearts that go, with pain.
FAREWELL TO ITALY
Afar were the frets of Milan ;
Below, the enchanted lakes;
And was it the mist of the evening,
Or the mist that the memory makes ?
We gave to the pale horizon
The Naples that evening gives ;
We reckoned where Rome lies buried,
And we felt where Florence lives.
And as Hope bends low at parting
For a death-remembered tone,
We searched the land that Beauty
And Love have made their own.
We would take of her hair some ringlet,
Some keepsake from her breast,
And catch of her plaintive music
The strain that is tenderest.
So we strolled in the yellow gloaming
(Our speech with musing still)
Till the noise of the militant village
Fell faint on Calvary Hill.
And scarcely our mood was broken
Of near-impending loss
To find at the bend of the pathway
A station of the Cross.
THROUGH ITALY WITH THE POETS
And up through the green aisle climbing
(Each shrine like a counted bead),
We heard, from above, the swaying
And mystical chant of the creed.
Then the dead seemed the only living,
And the real seemed the wraith,
And we yielded ourselves to the vision
We saw with the eye of Faith.
Then she said, "Let us go no farther :
'T is fit that we make farewell
While forest and lake and mountain
Are under the vesper spell."
As we rested, the leafy silence
Broke like a cloud at play,
And a browned and burdened woman
Passed, singing, down the way.
'T was a song of health and labor,
Of childlike gladness, blent
With the patience of the toiler
That tyrants call content.
"Nay, this is the word we have waited,"
I said, "that a year and a sea
From now, in our doom of exile,
Shall echo of Italy."
FAREWELL TO ITALY 429
Just then what a burst from the bosquet
As a bird might have found its soul !
And each by the halt of the heart-throb
Knew 't was the rossignol.
Then we drew to each other nearer
And drank at the grey wall's verge
The sad, sweet song of lovers,
Their passion and their dirge.
And the carol of Toil below us
And the psean of Prayer above
Were naught to the song of Sorrow,
For under the sorrow was Love.
Alas! for the dear remembrance
We chose for an amulet:
The one that is left to keep it
Ah! how can he forget?
ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON,
DAY AND TO I
OVERDUE.
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
