SAINT PETER'S CHAINS;
OR,
ROME AND THE ITALIAN REVOLUTION.
TO THE GREAT MEMORY OF
POPE PIUS THE NINTH.
June 1, 1897.
I. PART I.
The Revolt against Christian Civilization.
I.
CHRISTMAS EVE, 1859.
This night, O Earth, a Saviour germinate!
Drop down, ye Heavens, your sweetness from above!
This night is closed the iron book of Fate;
Open'd this night the book of endless Love.
On from the Orient like a breeze doth move
The joy world-wide—a breeze that wafts a freight
Of vernal song o'er lands benumbed so late,
Rivers ice-bound and winter-wasted grove.
Onward from Bethlehem, westward o'er the Ægean
Travels like night the starry Feast Divine;
All realms rejoice; but loudest swells the pæan
From that white Basilic on the Esquiline
Beneath whose roof in sunlike radiance clad
The suffering Pontiff stands—to-night not sad.
II.
ITALIAN ‘UNIFICATION’ IN 1860.
The land which Improvisatores throng
With one light bound would freedom improvise,
Freedom by England dragged from raging seas
Through centuries of battling right and wrong:
The gamesters crowned, their loaded dice down flung,
Divide their gains;
while—shamelessly at ease—
Gold-spangled Fortune, tinselled to the knees,
Runs on the tight-rope of the State new-strung!
O Liberty, stern goddess, sad and grave,
To whom are dear the hearts that watch and wait,
The hand laborious strenuous as the glaive,
The strong, staid head, the soul supreme o'er fate,
With what slow scorn thou turn'st incensed of mien
From mimic Freedom's operatic scene!
III.
GREAT CONNIVING POWERS.
The kingdom-selling king puts forth a hand
Vile from Church-plunder, leprous to the bone,
To rend a second spoil
from Peter's throne:
Silent, yet false, a proud yet servile band,
Europe's ‘Great Powers,’ each from its distant strand
Applaud the dragon teeth thus deftly sown,
Nor heed how France in treason's undertone
Whispers, ‘Rome next! Wait, win—and understand.’
‘Great Powers!’ blind Powers, because they fear to see!
Old realms that seal an upstart's new decree!
Think ye this traffic means for you no loss?
Christ's Vicar bound, what king thenceforth is free?
Death-doom of Europe's peace and liberty
Is that your state-clerks smilingly engross!
IV.
THE RETRIBUTION.
Statesmen, beware! The Spiritual Power displaced
The Moral Power descends. Where then are ye?
The eyeless Anarch of the years to be
Draws near your feast; will meet you soon full-faced;
With cap blood-red his low, base brows are graced:
His name we know—‘The Crowned Democracy:’
Wild appetite and reckless pride is he;
He scorns all laws on rights prescriptive based.
He comes: what stands? God's Word that never errs
Replies, ‘The Church: of death she shall not taste:’
If stands the Church, were it not better, Sirs,
That girt by Nations just and sage she stood
Than like one fortress 'mid a boundless waste,
One sad, sole watch-tower by a shipless flood?
V.
JUVENILE PATRIOTISM.
‘Great Rome our Capitol! Great Rome restored!’
These cries are watchwords, warring each on each;
Two forms confused of unhistoric speech:
Rome never reigned, a single nation's lord:
Rome was at first not State, but bandit horde;
A State came next. O'er Carthage' yawning breach
Rome dashed through flame while still beyond her reach
Italian States the upstart's name abhorred.
Later, Rome's Empire rose: a subject earth
A world, not Nation, owned its sovereign sway:
It fell: at last Time's mystery came to birth:
Rome was the Church's seat; man's hope, his stay.
Great Rome made pigmy, Rome one nation's head,
Means this—‘The old Rome—the Christian—both are dead.’
VI.
THE ORIGIN OF THE TEMPORAL POWER.
For centuries rose the cry from vale and plain
From cities sacked and homesteads black with fire,
‘Where reigned an Empire ruin now doth reign:
Our Emperor sought Byzantium: we expire:
The Lombard wrecks the north: pitiless in ire
The Goth devours the south. Fiercer than Cain
The Vandals with the blood of brethren stain
Altar and hearth. Great Pontiff, Roman Sire!
Christ's chief of shepherds for the souls of men
To thee we turn remembering days long since
When camped the Hun beneath the Roman wall—
That day Pope Leo saved us. Save, as then,
That little remnant left! On thee we call:
Thy sons would be thy subjects: be our Prince!’
VII.
THE OLD AND NEW BARBARIANS.
When Rome had fallen and now half-ruinous lay
Barbaric kings from many a distant coast
Alone, unarmed, meekest when mighty most,
Trod her deserted courts and wept, men say:
None raised therein his seat of sovereign sway:
Dumb through the wreck they glided like a ghost:
They felt the Past! Who make that Past their boast
This hour feel nothing, braggarts of the day.
These mimic statesmen stand confuted thus:
‘Rome ruled the earth through Greatness: that was meet;
Your trust is Gallic Fraud and “Plébiscite”:
Great Rome, metropolis of that world of old
Reduced to crown one new-raised state o'er-bold
Would make its impotence but ridiculous.’
VIII.
TO ITALY, 1861.
All-radiant region! would that thou wert free!
Free 'mid thine Alpine realm of cloud and pine
Free 'mid the rich vales of thine Apennine
Free to the Adrian and the Tyrrhene Sea!
God with a twofold freedom franchise thee!
Freedom from alien bonds, so often thine,
Freedom from Gentile hopes—death-fires that shine
O'er the foul grave of Pagan liberty
With Pagan empire side by side interred;
Then round the fixed throne of their Roman Sire
Thy sister States should hang, a Pleiad choir
With saintly beam unblunted and unblurred,
A splendour to the Christian splendour clinging,
A lyre star-strung ever the ‘new song’ singing!
IX.
THE ITALY OF OLD.
Naples and Florence, Parma, Lucca—these
Survived, the last of countless states that bore
Their starry crowns in history's heaven of yore,
Amalfi imaged in her subject seas,
Pisa with laurel fresher for the breeze
That waved the pinewoods shadowing her shore,
Sienna famed in arts Genoa in war,
Milan still proud of antique liturgies.
Great land! thy patriots old these marvels prized,
Each with its palace-keep and minster vast:
Not fusion, but a realm confederate
They hoped, they claimed; now first a vulgarer fate
Tramples that claim. Dissevered from their past
They stand—in Freedom's name provincialized.
X.
THE INVASION OF THE PAPAL STATES.
Sept. 1860.
O Italy! the guilt but half is thine!
Thy sons they are not; foes they are, not friends,
These ill-crown'd kings that brim for ill-mask'd ends
Freedom's pure cup with blasphemy's false wine.
Thou of the hermit's cell, the martyr's shrine!
Thou, dew'd with beauty and the Aonian dream
Like Greece, but higher placed in God's great scheme,
His second Salem's second Palestine!—
The malison of Freedom evermore
Cleave to his name who burst the eternal band
That with Religion links her, hand in hand,
And hurl'd the child against the sire in war.
Religion spurn'd, there freedom hath no place:—
Freedom the pillar is: Virtue its base!
XI.
ROSSI.
Romans—in name—to Liberty, your god
Who lift red hands, suppliants self-deified,
Betwixt her altar and your rock of pride
A stream there rolls fiercer than Alpine flood,
A fatal stream of murdered Rossi's blood!
For Liberty he lived; and when he died,
Prisoner that new Rienzi's corse beside
The King, the Father, and the Pontiff stood!
What rite piacular from that impious deed
Hath cleansed your hands? Accuse not adverse stars
If guilt unwept achieve not virture's meed.
Years staunch not treason. All his sands old Time
Shakes down to keep unblurred those characters
Which calendar the Feasts of prosperous crime.
XII.
TRUE AND FALSE LOVE OF FREEDOM.
They that for Freedom feel not love but lust,
Irreverent, knowing not her spiritual claim,
And they the votaries blind of windy fame,
And they who cry, ‘I will because I must,’
They, too, that launch, false to a freeman's trust,
A bandit's shaft revenge or greed their aim,
And they that make her sacred cause their game
From restlessness or spleen or sheer disgust
At duteous days—all these, the brood of night,
Diverse by one black note detected stand,
Their scorn of every barrier raised by right
To awe self-will. Howe'er by virtue banned
By wisdom spurned, that act the moment needs
Licensed they deem; holy whate'er succeeds.
XIII.
THE APPROACHING DEED.
The streets lie silent in the shadows deep
Of obelisk and statue o'er them thrown;
The foe advances, but the people sleep;
No sound save yon cicala's lazy drone:
Sunshine intense each glittering dome doth steep,
Each Lombard tower, each convent court grass-grown,
Flames on the arch, and heats each column prone
While feebler grows each fountain's drowsy leap.
Methinks such stillness reigned that hour in Rome
Three centuries since, when through the fiery air
Rose, heard alone, the saintly Pontiff's prayer;
Rose, and a slumbering world escaped its doom:
The Crescent sank 'neath red Lepanto's shore:—
Woe to the world when Saints are heard no more!
XIV.
THE CONSUMMATION.
20th of September, 1870.
The bolt hath fallen! The Abominable that sate
By that sad prophet, Daniel, long foretold
Within God's Holy City throned of old,
The ‘Abominable that maketh desolate,’
Within a holier city now keeps state:
One power alone the All-Just to him denies;
He dares not quench the Daily Sacrifice:
Death-pale he sits prescient of coming fate.
Is it my crime, pale river, if no tears
Dropt from these eyes thy placid breast have stained
Freedom and Faith thus impiously profaned?
Not so! The hour is man's: with God the years:
Once more His Church will shame her children's fears;
True Freedom wax when Freedom's wraith hath waned.
II. PART II.
XV.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL APOSTASY.
Trampling a dark hill a red sun athwart
I saw a host that rent their clothes and hair
And dashed their spread hands 'gainst the sunset glare
And cried, ‘Go from us, God, since God Thou art!
Utterly from our coasts and streets depart,
Court, camp, and senate hall, and mountain bare;
Our pomp Thou troublest, and our feast dost scare,
And with Thy temples dost confuse our mart!
Depart Thou from our hearing and our seeing:
Depart Thou from the works and ways of men
Their laws, their thoughts, the inmost of their being:
Black nightmare, hence, that earth may breathe again!’
‘Can God depart?’ I asked. A voice replied,
Close by, ‘Not so; each Sin at heart is Deicide.’
XVI.
A RUINED FRENCH ABBEY.
In thee the Daily Sacrifice hath ceased—
Twain Avarchs, shades far cast from Antichrist,
Revolt, and blasphemy, Sin's king and priest,
Here slew the Just and for His raiment diced:
Here Revolution, ruin-beneficed
Sharpened with rapine's file her dagger's edge:
She sold the spoil who wrought the sacrilege:
False Freedom spake it; and her word sufficed.
O France, long dear to God, once saintly nation,
Land of Saint Louis and the Fleur de Lys
Must Italy partake thy desolation
Partaking thy transgression? Say, must she
The grace and glory of God's New Creation,
Make end like yonder skeleton tower and thee?
XVII.
THE LAWLESS RACE.
The Scriptures of the Unjust thus prophesy:
‘The Gentiles we! your Christian Good is Ill:
We, faithless styled, to Babel faithful still,
Build as she built and laws save hers defy:
No difference we concede 'twixt Truth and Lie
Save what the nations fashion. Each at will
Some Faith should license; fools dissentient kill:
Best creed is ‘Unbelief, in Unity.’
But what is written? ‘This shall be the lot
Of all who war, Jerusalem, on thee:
Within their mouth the tongue dried up shall rot;
The eye drop out, that eye which would not see;
And, shivering as they stand, from off their bones
Their flesh shall melt and rot upon the stones.’
XVIII.
Remember, Italy, thy judged Compeer
France that before thee trod the ways unblest:
Long since she made her Revolution: rest
She makes not yet, from anguished year to year
Circling through wreck to ruin yet more drear.
‘Make them a wheel!’ Thus prayed, by rebels pressed,
The Prophet-King: how oft, a bitter jest,
That warning haunts the thoughtful patriot's ear!
O Italy, discern 'twixt grain and chaff!
For Freedom's sake the enchanter's cup fling down:
Spurn the base brood that tempt but to betray!
On whom, deceived ones, wage ye war this day?
On that sole King who held his sceptre-staff
Freedom to fence; for man's sake wore his crown.
XIX.
THE CHURCH OF THE MADELEINE AT PARIS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
O that the people of this guilty land
Might estimate themselves and it aright!
Accept yon Temple's sternly kind command
Her warning vainly whispered day and night:
To lift their glory to a loftier height
A people raised this creature of their hand:—
Teach them, huge pile, with all thy pillared might,
Humility! Do thou their boast withstand!
Bid them, in sight of angels and of men
Brow-bent and round thee kneeling, to confess
That sin whose serpent offspring, not yet dead,
Creeps round the earth and stings it! Bid them shed
Such tears as fell in the waste wilderness
On thy worn bosom, penitent Magdalen!
XX.
THE STATUE OF VOLTAIRE,
ERECTED IN PARIS DURING THE GERMAN INVASION OF
1870.
What Shape ascends o'er yonder Stygian sea
Of upturned faces—Shape far-off descried
With myriad-wrinkled brow, and serpent-eyed?
That city which adores him, who is she?
Fitly the hour is chosen! Fatefully
Advance the armies sent to plague the pride
That built its tower on sand and God defied!
High Priest of Unbelief and Anarchy
Ris'st thou to see thy work? the doom to hear
Of nations, Christian once, that spurn their trust?
Hark to that gun! More near it sounds, and near—
Land of brave hearts! ere yet descends that woe
Which comes to save not slay, thy Tempter know!
Dash back that idol to its native dust!
XXI.
THE FRANCE OF A FUTURE TIME.
Laugh, thou that weep'st; or with thy weeping blend
The glory of that joy which mocks at pain:
Vain was thy pride; thy penance is not vain:
That woe was the beginning, not the end:
Beyond that rain of fire I see descend
Armies of God t'ward yon ensanguined plain;
And these the Cross and those the Crown sustain:—
Elect of Penitents, thy forehead bend;
Meet thou that crown in hope that springs from love!
Once more true greatness greets thee from above:
At last, while far away the tempests rave,
Forth from the ashes of thy Pagan boast
Leaps thy new life! 'Mid yon celestial host
Thy Clotilde triumphs, and thy Genevieve.
XXII.
THE NEW GERMAN PERSECUTION.
Revolted province of the Church of God,
But yesterday an Empire made! Too long
Thou lift'st the froward foot and clamorous tongue
Unweeting of the retributive rod:
Her singers once—her saints—thy pastures trod:
Still rise her minster towers thy streets among:
Her crumbling abbeys still denounce their wrong:
Hers every flower that gems the sacred sod!
This day thy Teachers world-renowned impeach
With deepening spleen the Scriptures as the Pope:
Learn from thy second fall! refrain thy speech:
With humbleness alone is stored thy hope:
Judge thou thyself; staunch first thy wound at home:
Rome's prodigal is not the judge of Rome.
XXIII.
Fair Land! A question I would ask of thee:
A time there was when, wanderers wild and rude,
Thy children clave the river, pierced the wood
Heart-strong yet blind, nor wise, nor just, nor free:—
What changed to Realms that raging Anarchy?
What Power was that which tamed the barbarous brood,
Evoked its thought; its wayward will subdued;
Its warring kingdoms crowned with unity?
The Faith—the Church! What progress had been thine
That Church disowned? Thy Nations where this day
Shorn of that Faith's surviving discipline?
Thy Prophet's teaching where? Thy Poet's lay?
That Church was Italy's selectest dower—
Are those her friends who mock its Head this hour?
XXIV.
THE FAITHFUL FEW.
Not vain that ten years' agony! Thus much
It proved: whate'er were states and courts, whate'er
Statesmen sense-blind might swear and then unswear,
In Europe's heart survived great Nature's touch:
From farthest lands there flocked who scorned to clutch
Fruit of false peace: they rushed to do and dare
Or die. Of such was Lamoricière,
Charette, O'Reilly, Pimodan; of such
Kanzler, who, when the Roman wall in rolled,
Stood in the breach. Knights of the Faith, 'tis well!
Your place is with those Genoese of old
Who, sole of Europe, when Byzantium fell
Fought for the Cross. Ye saved mankind one shame:
Mentana guards your dead; the Church your fame.
XXV.
MONTALEMBERT AND DE MÉRODE.
Montalembert! De Mérode! Linked were ye
In bonds more strong than those of human love,
Twins of one Faith and gendered from above—
One fruitful Truth, ‘God's City must be free,’
Prime Truth of Christianized Civility:
For that one Truth in word and work ye strove;
Nor strove in vain, as years to come shall prove
When those who shape their ‘Throned Democracy,’
That Matter-God the foe of cot and crown,
Hard hunted by the creature of their hands,
Flee from his face amazed o'er seas and lands.
The praise of such ye spurned, nor feared their frown:
Ye battled for man's hope; God's Church confessed:
Warriors, sleep well; for ye have earned your rest.
XXVI.
THE WORLD'S APPRECIATIONS.
Minuter minds conceive not what is great:
To them 'tis nothing as to fleshly ears
The music of the planetary spheres:
Its full-faced presence leaves them unelate;
And when, submissive to all-mastering fate,
That greatness dies, or, deathless, disappears,
Upon its grave the triflers drop no tears,
The feasters not one hour their jests abate.
To such what meant that Roman Kingship hoar,
Link of the old world with ours? A gaud, now gone!
—'Tis thus when parents die! the wife, the son
Weep by the bier; the poor beside the door:
Small shapes that buzz around feel anguish none:
To cricket and to moth the house is as before.
XXVII.
THE HIGHER CIVILIZATION.
Blow struck at Rome an instant echo hath
In every land where sits the Church a guest:
The centre's there. A local church oppressed
By popular madness or a tyrant's wrath
Not less, like Thecla, lions in her path,
May stand secure; though galled in head and breast
May work God's work, then take a martyr's rest
Cecilia-like, within the crimsoned bath
Of her own blood. Meantime the Church is free,
Her doctrine sure while free He sits at Rome
Who speaks the authentic voice of Christendom:
His Faith, all know, is hers. If bound were He,
The whole no longer could secure the part:
The world's broad hand would lie upon the Church's heart.
III. PART III.
XXVIII.
THE TEMPORAL POWER.
That one high realm which, not through fraud or force
But for man's need, with glad consent of men
Rose when the Roman empire lay a corse,
And the Northern Beast forth bounding from his den
Ravined alike on priest and citizen
Hath oftenest fallen. Bandits without remorse
Plotters low-voiced, and Peoples blasphemy-hoarse,
Have wrought its fall again and yet again:
Yet evermore that Hand beyond the skies
Which raised it first, restores that Sign august:
The nations wake; they stare with wondering eyes;
'Tis there, that Power! It lives because it must!
The shade it is of Peter's Rock: far hurled
It heaves along the great waves of the world.
XXIX.
AUSTRIA AND SPAIN.
IL GRAN RIFIUTO.
Austria and Spain, high daughters of a Past
So rich in rites of sage civility,
To Kings so loyal, yet in heart so free,
So true to ancient Faith when Error's blast
O'er the blind North in passionate tempest passed,
So filial to the Apostolic See,
So firm when Unbelief and Anarchy
Down the prone gulfs dragged France so far and fast,
And Nations silent stood:—What Sin, what Fate
What poison froze your blood to stagnant gall
When burst false Piedmont through that Roman gate?
Lament, brave Cid, if souls can weep in heaven!
Crowned Pole,
lament! By that strong hand was driven
The earth-conquering Moslem from Vienna's wall!
XXX.
THE NATIONS OF CHRISTENDOM.
The Mother of the churches was perforce
The Mother of the Nations; for in each
That moral mind, pure will, true heart and speech
Which urge great Nations starlike on their course
Found in Religion, there alone, its source:
'Twas hers the majesty of Law to teach;
To exalt high ends, illicit means impeach;
'Twixt loyal and obsequious make divorce.
A clan can boast its past and wreak its rage;
A firm can waft its bales o'er lands and seas;
A school can paint its picture, write its page:
What is it makes a Nation more than these?
That ‘Law of Nations’ which to lawless might
Limits assigns; gives sovereignty to Right.
XXXI.
THE LAW OF NATIONS.
The Law of Nations died the death that hour
When Rome, the moulder of the Nations, fell:
O'er earth and heard by all rang out the knell
When first above the Capitolian tower
Far streamed the standard of the Lawless Power:
Nor less o'er palace, camp, and citadel
That hour a whisper crept—inaudible
To lands of honour reft, old Europe's dower;
‘Let us depart.’ Their patron Saints august
Left they that hour the Nations? We, since then,
Have seen strange omens and shall see again;
Treaties are null! no realm the rest can trust!
A shameful day draws to a stormy close:
But whence or when the vengeance no man knows.
XXXII.
ST. GREGORY THE GREAT AND CHARLEMAGNE.
1.
Gregory! To thee her Faith our England owes;
But ere to England thine Augustine sailed
Rome had in thee her secular ruler hailed:
Freely her bishop for her prince she chose.
Two ages passed, then Charlemagne arose:
Crowned by Pope Leo 'mid his barons mailed
He swore to shield thenceforth God's Church assailed
By force or fraud. Unlike these days to those!
The family of Kings have wrought a wrong
First on their kingdoms' honour, next their own:
What wrong? The Sire of Kings lay late o'erthrown
By hand usurping and the lying tongue;
Kings sat and kept the clothes of that wild throng:
On Kings the loss shall fall—but not on Kings alone.
XXXIII.
ST. GREGORY THE GREAT AND ENGLAND.
2.
As when, descending from that God-led bark
At last on Ararat's broad summit stayed
A ruined earth's sad heir yet undismayed
Forth paced with all his sons the Patriarch;
As when above that world of waters stark
He stood while down they rushed and standing prayed;
As when he followed, through some wave-worn glade
With over-arching horns of granite dark
That Hand which pointed still he knew not where:—
Thus with his monks went forth from yonder pile
Augustine missioned to that northern isle;
Yon Cœlian Hill descended thus footbare;
Thus found that wilderness he sought; thus trod
A stony land of death and gave that land to God.
XXXIV.
THE NOBLE REVENGE.
The nations stood around thee, frowning some
Some coldly pitying when thy head lay low:
On them what good for ill wilt thou bestow
When Wrong that overcame is overcome?
When earth in Faith's eclipse lies cold and numb;
When pride hath reaped the fruits she holp to sow;
When anarch peoples hurled from wealth to woe
In vain deplore their vanished Christendom;
When from the nether night, his penal prison
By spurious science loosed the Apostate Angel
Lifts his red bond and claims the astonished lands
Shine thou that hour, a sun from night new-risen,
Chase thou with thine his foul, disproved evangel:
Raise thou thy Cross, and bind the Murderer's hands!
XXXV.
Yet, yet, ye Kings, and rulers of the earth
Lift up your eyes unto the hills eterne
Whence your salvation comes! From earth's dark urn
The great floods burst! O'er each ancestral hearth
Look forth, ye bold and virtuous Poor, look forth;
The meteor signs of woes to come discern;
And whence the danger be not slow to learn;
Then greet it with loud scorn and warlike mirth.
The banner of the Church is ever flying!
Less than a storm avails not to unfold
The Cross emblazoned there in massive gold:
Away with doubts and sadness tears and sighing!
It is by faith, by patience, and by dying
That we must conquer as our sires of old.
XXXVI.
WALTER SCOTT AT THE TOMB OF THE STUARTS IN SAINT PETER'S.
1.
The wild deer, when the shaft is in his side
Seeks his first lair beneath the forest hoar:
Drawn back from reboant deeps the exhausted tide
Breathes his last sob on the forsaken shore:
When on the village green the sports have died
The child stands knocking at his grandsire's door:
So stands by this far tomb of Scotland's pride
Her greatest son, death-doomed, and travel-sore.
So stand, last Singer of the Heroic Age!
Dead are those years so loyal, brave, and high
That whilome blazoned History's Missal page,
Ring yet through thy glad Minstrel-Breviary:
Old Pilgrim, ended is thy pilgrimage
This hour. The shadows round thee close: now die!
XXXVII.
WALTER SCOTT AT THE TOMB OF THE STUARTS IN SAINT PETER'S.
2.
Staff-propt he stands and all his country's past
Streams back before his sadly-kindling eye;
King after King, as cloud on cloud when fast
The storm-rack rushes through the autumnal sky:
Aughrim to Flodden answers! on the blast
Now Mary's, now the Bruce's standards fly:
Those earliest, Irish, kings he sees at last
Cross-crowned on old Iona's shores who lie.
Thus as he gazed, a Voice from vault and shrine
Whispered around him—and from Peter's Tomb—
‘Not one alone but every Royal Line
To my strong gates, as thou to these, shall come
Heart-pierced at last: for mine they were; and mine
The cradles and the graves of Christendom.’
XXXVIII.
THE ‘ARA CŒLI’ ON THE CAPITOL.
Here, where of old the Roman Senate sate,
Where, thundering from his Capitolian throne
Co-regent of the Universal State
Jove o'er that Roman sceptre laid his own,
For centuries the Franciscans, humbly elate
Kept their aerial haunt and vigil lone
Here, like that lark which ‘sings at heaven's gate’
Sang, first, Rome's Christmas carols;—they are gone!
Far down beneath, the Benedictines lay
Of Orders first; far down whose science soared
Highest; far down Ignatius' Templars,
they
Who raised o'er earth the Crosier and the Sword:
Here reigned the triumph of Humility:
Thy pagan triumph, Pride, is here restored.
XXXIX.
THE RESTORATION.
A Sorrow that for shame had hid her face
Soared to Heaven's gate and knelt in penance there
Beneath the dusk cloud of her own wet hair
Weeping, as who would fain some deed erase
That blots in dread eclipse baptismal grace:
Like a felled tree with all its branches fair
She lay—her forehead on the ivory stair—
Low murmuring, ‘Just art Thou, but I am base:’
Then saw I in my spirit's unsealed ken
How Heaven's bright hosts thrilled like the dews of morn
When May-winds on the sacred, snowy thorn
Change diamonds into rubies: Magdalen
Arose, and kissed the Saviour's feet once more
And to that suffering soul His peace and pardon bore.
XL.
Nations self-cheated, this shall come to pass—
From yonder altar to their kingdoms down
True Kings once more shall pace, sceptre and crown
On that dim sea of marble and of brass
Showering, as angels on the sea of glass
Their amaranth crowns. All Powers once more shall own
Man's debt perpetual to Saint Peter's throne,
All lands there find their Freedom's shield. Alas!
What now are Kings? A thousand years each nation
Claimed to stand subject to a Father's eye:
All realms invoked the Apostle's arbitration
An unseen world their strength and unity:
Proud kings, proud realms, your victory is your loss!
That rule is brief which rests not on the Cross.
XLI.
SAINT PETER.
Rock of the Rock! As He, the Light of Light,
Shows forth His Father's glory evermore,
So show'st thou forth the Son's unshaken might
Throned in thy unity on every shore:
On thee His Church He built; and though all night
Tempests of leaguering demons round it roar
The Gates of Hell prevail not, and the Right
Beams lordliest through the breaking clouds of war.
Strength of that Church! the Nations round thee reel;
Like hunted creatures Kingdoms flee and pant;
But God upon His Church hath set His seal,
Fusing His own eternal adamant
Through all its bastions and its towers in thee:
Luminous it stands through thy solidity.
XLII.
SAINT PETER.
First of the Faith he made confession sole
Taught by the Father, not by flesh and blood:
Then He the parts Who strengthens by the Whole
Bade him make strong his brethren, and the rod
Gave him of kingship. By that Syrian flood
Lastly, a Love thrice-challenged he confessed
That singly passed the love of all the rest
And straightway to his hand Incarnate God
Lifting that Hand which made the worlds, accorded
Rule of His flock world-wide both fair and pure:
The mystery of His might in One he hoarded
That all, made one, might live in one secure:
In Christ the race redeemed is One;—in thee
Forth stands, a Sacrament, that Unity.
