Chapter 9

Admire, exult--despise--laugh, weep--for here There is such matter for all feeling:--Man! Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear, Ages and realms are crowded in this span, This mountain, whose obliterated plan The pyramid of empires pinnacled, Of Glory's gewgaws shining in the van Till the sun's rays with added flame were filled! Where are its golden roofs? where those who dared to build?

CX.

Tully was not so eloquent as thou, Thou nameless column with the buried base! What are the laurels of the Caesar's brow? Crown me with ivy from his dwelling-place. Whose arch or pillar meets me in the face, Titus or Trajan's? No; 'tis that of Time: Triumph, arch, pillar, all he doth displace, Scoffing; and apostolic statues climb To crush the imperial urn, whose ashes slept sublime,

CXI.

Buried in air, the deep blue sky of Rome, And looking to the stars; they had contained A spirit which with these would find a home, The last of those who o'er the whole earth reigned, The Roman globe, for after none sustained But yielded back his conquests:--he was more Than a mere Alexander, and unstained With household blood and wine, serenely wore His sovereign virtues--still we Trajan's name adore.

CXII.

Where is the rock of Triumph, the high place Where Rome embraced her heroes? where the steep Tarpeian--fittest goal of Treason's race, The promontory whence the traitor's leap Cured all ambition? Did the Conquerors heap Their spoils here? Yes; and in yon field below, A thousand years of silenced factions sleep-- The Forum, where the immortal accents glow, And still the eloquent air breathes--burns with Cicero!

CXIII.

The field of freedom, faction, fame, and blood: Here a proud people's passions were exhaled, From the first hour of empire in the bud To that when further worlds to conquer failed; But long before had Freedom's face been veiled, And Anarchy assumed her attributes: Till every lawless soldier who assailed Trod on the trembling Senate's slavish mutes, Or raised the venal voice of baser prostitutes.

CXIV.

Then turn we to our latest tribune's name, From her ten thousand tyrants turn to thee, Redeemer of dark centuries of shame-- The friend of Petrarch--hope of Italy-- Rienzi! last of Romans! While the tree Of freedom's withered trunk puts forth a leaf, Even for thy tomb a garland let it be-- The forum's champion, and the people's chief-- Her new-born Numa thou, with reign, alas! too brief.

CXV.

Egeria! sweet creation of some heart Which found no mortal resting-place so fair As thine ideal breast; whate'er thou art Or wert,--a young Aurora of the air, The nympholepsy of some fond despair; Or, it might be, a beauty of the earth, Who found a more than common votary there Too much adoring; whatsoe'er thy birth, Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.

CXVI.

The mosses of thy fountain still are sprinkled With thine Elysian water-drops; the face Of thy cave-guarded spring, with years unwrinkled, Reflects the meek-eyed genius of the place, Whose green wild margin now no more erase Art's works; nor must the delicate waters sleep, Prisoned in marble, bubbling from the base Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap The rill runs o'er, and round, fern, flowers, and ivy creep,

CXVII.

Fantastically tangled; the green hills Are clothed with early blossoms, through the grass The quick-eyed lizard rustles, and the bills Of summer birds sing welcome as ye pass; Flowers fresh in hue, and many in their class, Implore the pausing step, and with their dyes Dance in the soft breeze in a fairy mass; The sweetness of the violet's deep blue eyes, Kissed by the breath of heaven, seems coloured by its skies.

CXVIII.

Here didst thou dwell, in this enchanted cover, Egeria! thy all heavenly bosom beating For the far footsteps of thy mortal lover; The purple Midnight veiled that mystic meeting With her most starry canopy, and seating Thyself by thine adorer, what befell? This cave was surely shaped out for the greeting Of an enamoured Goddess, and the cell Haunted by holy Love--the earliest oracle!

CXIX.

And didst thou not, thy breast to his replying, Blend a celestial with a human heart; And Love, which dies as it was born, in sighing, Share with immortal transports? could thine art Make them indeed immortal, and impart The purity of heaven to earthly joys, Expel the venom and not blunt the dart-- The dull satiety which all destroys-- And root from out the soul the deadly weed which cloys?

CXX.

Alas! our young affections run to waste, Or water but the desert: whence arise But weeds of dark luxuriance, tares of haste, Rank at the core, though tempting to the eyes, Flowers whose wild odours breathe but agonies, And trees whose gums are poison; such the plants Which spring beneath her steps as Passion flies O'er the world's wilderness, and vainly pants For some celestial fruit forbidden to our wants.

CXXI.

O Love! no habitant of earth thou art-- An unseen seraph, we believe in thee,-- A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart, But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see, The naked eye, thy form, as it should be; The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven, Even with its own desiring phantasy, And to a thought such shape and image given, As haunts the unquenched soul--parched--wearied--wrung--and riven.

CXXII.

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, And fevers into false creation;--where, Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone. Can Nature show so fair? Where are the charms and virtues which we dare Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men, The unreached Paradise of our despair, Which o'er-informs the pencil and the pen, And overpowers the page where it would bloom again.

CXXIII.

Who loves, raves--'tis youth's frenzy--but the cure Is bitterer still; as charm by charm unwinds Which robed our idols, and we see too sure Nor worth nor beauty dwells from out the mind's Ideal shape of such; yet still it binds The fatal spell, and still it draws us on, Reaping the whirlwind from the oft-sown winds; The stubborn heart, its alchemy begun, Seems ever near the prize--wealthiest when most undone.

CXXIV.

We wither from our youth, we gasp away-- Sick--sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst, Though to the last, in verge of our decay, Some phantom lures, such as we sought at first-- But all too late,--so are we doubly curst. Love, fame, ambition, avarice--'tis the same-- Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst-- For all are meteors with a different name, And death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame.

CXXV.

Few--none--find what they love or could have loved: Though accident, blind contact, and the strong Necessity of loving, have removed Antipathies--but to recur, ere long, Envenomed with irrevocable wrong; And Circumstance, that unspiritual god And miscreator, makes and helps along Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod, Whose touch turns hope to dust--the dust we all have trod.

CXXVI.

Our life is a false nature--'tis not in The harmony of things,--this hard decree, This uneradicable taint of sin, This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree, Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew-- Disease, death, bondage, all the woes we see-- And worse, the woes we see not--which throb through The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.

CXXVII.

Yet let us ponder boldly--'tis a base Abandonment of reason to resign Our right of thought--our last and only place Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine: Though from our birth the faculty divine Is chained and tortured--cabined, cribbed, confined, And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine Too brightly on the unprepared mind, The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the blind.

CXXVIII.

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 'twere 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

CXXIX.

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, For which the palace of the present hour Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower.

CXXX.

O Time! the beautifier of the dead, Adorner of the ruin, comforter And only healer when the heart hath bled-- Time! the corrector where our judgments err, The test of truth, love,--sole philosopher, For all beside are sophists, from thy thrift, Which never loses though it doth defer-- Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift My hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave of thee a gift:

CXXXI.

Amidst this wreck, where thou hast made a shrine And temple more divinely desolate, Among thy mightier offerings here are mine, Ruins of years--though few, yet full of fate: If thou hast ever seen me too elate, Hear me not; but if calmly I have borne Good, and reserved my pride against the hate Which shall not whelm me, let me not have worn This iron in my soul in vain--shall THEY not mourn?

CXXXII.

And thou, who never yet of human wrong Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis! Here, where the ancients paid thee homage long-- Thou, who didst call the Furies from the abyss, And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss For that unnatural retribution--just, Had it but been from hands less near--in this Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust! Dost thou not hear my heart?--Awake! thou shalt, and must.

CXXXIII.

It is not that I may not have incurred For my ancestral faults or mine the wound I bleed withal, and had it been conferred With a just weapon, it had flowed unbound. But now my blood shall not sink in the ground; To thee I do devote it--THOU shalt take The vengeance, which shall yet be sought and found, Which if _I_ have not taken for the sake-- But let that pass--I sleep, but thou shalt yet awake.

CXXXIV.

And if my voice break forth, 'tis not that now I shrink from what is suffered: let him speak Who hath beheld decline upon my brow, Or seen my mind's convulsion leave it weak; But in this page a record will I seek. Not in the air shall these my words disperse, Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak The deep prophetic fulness of this verse, And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse!

CXXXV.

That curse shall be forgiveness.--Have I not-- Hear me, my mother Earth! behold it, Heaven!-- Have I not had to wrestle with my lot? Have I not suffered things to be forgiven? Have I not had my brain seared, my heart riven, Hopes sapped, name blighted, Life's life lied away? And only not to desperation driven, Because not altogether of such clay As rots into the souls of those whom I survey.

CXXXVI.

From mighty wrongs to petty perfidy Have I not seen what human things could do? From the loud roar of foaming calumny To the small whisper of the as paltry few And subtler venom of the reptile crew, The Janus glance of whose significant eye, Learning to lie with silence, would SEEM true, And without utterance, save the shrug or sigh, Deal round to happy fools its speechless obloquy.

CXXXVII.

But I have lived, and have not lived in vain: My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire, And my frame perish even in conquering pain, But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire: Something unearthly, which they deem not of, Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre, Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.

CXXXVIII.

The seal is set.--Now welcome, thou dread Power Nameless, yet thus omnipotent, which here Walk'st in the shadow of the midnight hour With a deep awe, yet all distinct from fear: Thy haunts are ever where the dead walls rear Their ivy mantles, and the solemn scene Derives from thee a sense so deep and clear That we become a part of what has been, And grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen.

CXXXIX.

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.

CXL.

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 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.

CXLI.

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!

CXLII.

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, And galleries, where my steps seem echoes strangely loud.

CXLIII.

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.

CXLIV.

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 grey 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.

CXLV.

'While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; 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.

CXLVI.

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!

CXLVII.

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.

CXLVIII.

There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light What do I gaze on? Nothing: Look again! Two forms are slowly shadowed on my sight-- Two insulated phantoms of the brain: It is not so: I see them full and plain-- An old man, and a female young and fair, Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose vein The blood is nectar:--but what doth she there, With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?

CXLIX.

Full swells the deep pure fountain of young life, Where ON the heart and FROM the heart we took Our first and sweetest nurture, when the wife, Blest into mother, in the innocent look, Or even the piping cry of lips that brook No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook She sees her little bud put forth its leaves-- What may the fruit be yet?--I know not--Cain was Eve's.

CL.

But here youth offers to old age the food, The milk of his own gift:--it is her sire To whom she renders back the debt of blood Born with her birth. No; he shall not expire While in those warm and lovely veins the fire Of health and holy feeling can provide Great Nature's Nile, whose deep stream rises higher Than Egypt's river:--from that gentle side Drink, drink and live, old man! heaven's realm holds no such tide.

CLI.

The starry fable of the milky way Has not thy story's purity; it is A constellation of a sweeter ray, And sacred Nature triumphs more in this Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss Where sparkle distant worlds:--Oh, holiest nurse! No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss To thy sire's heart, replenishing its source With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.

CLII.

Turn to the mole which Hadrian reared on high, Imperial mimic of old Egypt's piles, Colossal copyist of deformity, Whose travelled phantasy from the far Nile's Enormous model, doomed the artist's toils To build for giants, and for his vain earth, His shrunken ashes, raise this dome: How smiles The gazer's eye with philosophic mirth, To view the huge design which sprung from such a birth!

CLIII.

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 hyaena and the jackal in their shade; I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell Their glittering mass i' the sun, and have surveyed Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem prayed;

CLIV.

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.

CLV.

Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not; And why? it is not lessened; but thy mind, Expanded by the genius of the spot, Has grown colossal, and can only find A fit abode wherein appear enshrined Thy hopes of immortality; and thou Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, See thy God face to face, as thou dost now His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.

CLVI.

Thou movest--but increasing with th' 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 marbles--richer painting--shrines where flame The lamps of gold--and haughty dome which vies In air with Earth's chief structures, though their frame Sits on the firm-set ground--and this the clouds must claim.

CLVII.

Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break To separate contemplation, the great whole; And as the ocean many bays will make, That ask the eye--so here condense thy soul To more immediate objects, and control Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart Its eloquent proportions, and unroll In mighty graduations, part by part, The glory which at once upon thee did not dart.

CLVIII.

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; e'en 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.

CLIX.

Then pause and be enlightened; there is more In such a survey than the sating gaze Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore The worship of the place, or the mere praise Of art and its great masters, who could raise What former time, nor skill, nor thought could plan; The fountain of sublimity displays Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of man Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions can.

CLX.

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.

CLXI.

Or view the Lord of the unerring bow, The God of life, and poesy, and light-- The Sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow All radiant from his 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.

CLXII.

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 expressed 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?

CLXIII.

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 'twas wrought.

CLXIV.

But where is he, the pilgrim of my song, The being who upheld it through the past? Methinks he cometh late and tarries long. He is no more--these breathings are his last; His wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast, And he himself as nothing:--if he was Aught but a phantasy, and could be classed With forms which live and suffer--let that pass-- His shadow fades away into Destruction's mass,