University of Virginia Library

How strangely now
That buried past returns to me! My Sire!
With what a puissant hand and mastering brain
Didst thou build up that kingdom! With what high joy
I, then a child, my hand upon thy knee,
Mine eyes upon thy face, listened the tale!
Thy youth in Constantine's more beauteous Rome
Washed by Propontic waves; thy sedulous study
Of that once-splendid polity then grey-grown;
Thine early vow—how like to Stilicho's—
To prop that ruined realm, our foe of old—
Sustain her, not destroy. I hear thee speak:
‘The Empire's power survived the Empire's self:
She was a wreck yet ruled. My youth gone by,
I roamed amid her wrecks of greatness dead
Kingly, Republican, Imperial greatness;
In them the history of the world was writ:
All men saw that;
Alone I marked a cradle 'mid the tombs,
The cradle of whatever greatness God
Reserves for future earth. A sin it seemed
To snatch the sceptre from that wrinkled hand
Now feebler than a babe's.’ He ended thus;
‘Only when long experience painfully proved
That Rome, old Rome, lay choked in her own ashes,
I said, “A Gothic kingdom I will rear
Cast in the Roman mould.”’ I heard him speak it
With that deep voice and lion-like! My tears
Fell heavy on his hand.