Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts! Despoil'd 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 honour'd forms, whose busts around them close. (65)
There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light (66) What do I gaze on? Nothing: Look again! Two forms are slowly shadow'd on my sightTwo insulated phantoms of the brain: It is not so; I see them full and plainAn 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?
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.
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.
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.
Turn to the Mole which Hadrian rear'd on high, (67) Imperial mimic of old Egypt's piles, Colossal copyist of deformity,
Whose travell❜d phantasy from the far Nile's Enormous model, doom'd 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!
But lo! the dome-the vast and wondrous dome, (68) 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 hyæna and the jackall in their shade;
I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell
Their glittering mass i̇' the sun, and have survey'd Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem pray'd;
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 lessen'd; but thy mind, Expanded by the genius of the spot, Has grown colossal, and can only find A fit abode wherein appear enshrined Thy hopes of immortality; and thou Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, See thy God face to face, as thou dost now His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.
Thou movest-but increasing with the advance, Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise, Deceived by its gigantic elegance;
Vastness which grows-but grows to harmonize— All musical in its immensities;
Rich marbles-richer painting-shrines where flame The lamps of gold-and haughty dome which vies In air with Earth's chief structures, though their frame Sits on the firm-set ground-and this the clouds must claim.
Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break, To separate contemplation, the great whole; And as the ocean many bays will make, That ask the eye-so here condense thy soul To more immediate objects, and control Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart Its eloquent proportions, and unroll
In mighty graduations, part by part,
The glory which at once upon thee did not dart,
Not by its fault—but thine: Our outward sense Is but of gradual grasp—and as it is
That what we have of feeling most intense Outstrips our faint expression; even so this Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice
Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great Defies at first our Nature's littleness,
Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.
Then pause, and be enlighten'd; 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.
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 envenom'd 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- The Sun in human limbs array'd, 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.
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