University of Virginia Library

“O for one morning on the Acropolis!
With Salamis afront me, and, around,
The steeds of Hyperion, and the dark
Unplunging coursers of deliberate Night
Pacing the marble pediment unheard;
Recalcitrant Centaurs bridled by their manes
By Lapithae implacable, and Fate
With granite gaze watching the things foretold.
And then the long procession, gods and men,
Panathenaic, toward the Temple reared
By the imperishable race that chose
Wisdom for their Divinity, and, thus
Initiated, found in faultless form,
Or wrought or sung from mundane formlessness,
The secret of serenity. Virile Rome,
Intent on warfare till the world was won,
Gave ageing Hellas hospitality,
Guest not ungrateful. But the hasty hours
I spent at Paestum and Parthenope,
Have made me live so that I must not die
Till I have seen the violet sunset fade
Along the friezes of the Parthenon.

“Let me be just to Rome, even the Rome
Of the Tiara and the Fisher's Ring,
Tonsured and surpliced. The Hellenic mind
Moulded to its conception matter and spirit,
Marble and even thought, discarding all
That clouds consummate harmony, aware
Art is rejection. Comprehensive Rome
Shaped concord from all discords, and, when worlds
Fell to its sword, made Roman citizens
Of their strange gods. And so it is to-day,
Here where imperial piety confounds
Venus with Virgin, Saturn with Saint John,
Persephone with Agnes, and adores
Jove in Jehovah! Though I can but kneel
To the unnamed Divinity that haunts
No human shrine, but hovers in the air
With wings unseen, a vision not a voice,
Rome hath rebuked my northern narrowness:
And now with sympathetic gaze I watch
The brown-skinned peasant fingering her beads
Before the oil-lit shrine; the hurrying nun
Deep-cloistered in her wimple; mobile maid,
Her face alight with undefined desire,
Of patron Saint enamoured till he send
An earthly lover; aye, and sandalled monks
Mumbling their Aves, so they do but love
What they recite; flowers, candles, incense, all
That brings to lowly and laborious hearts
Comfort and tenderness. Rome understands.
At Seehaus I in church one day was shamed,
A Homer being my Hymn-Book. Rightly read,
Rome's Ritual is a poem, so I need
No missal more humane; and hence it lasts.
Withal, at times, my fingers fondly turn
The pages of the Lutheran Book fo prayer
My mother gave me; for the parent Past,
Of all things the most potent, still enfolds
Its far-off children.

“Sometimes I wonder if these Cardinals,
These Monsignori with minds full as free,
Heaven save the mark! as mine, are anchored fast
To their deep dogmas. Giacomelli spits
The Anti-Jansenists on pious pen,
And then unto his pagan library,—
No better Hellenist than he,—and shakes
His cassock, reading Aristophanes;
While Passionei with Voltaire corresponds,
And gives his poems to Pope Benedict.
His library he calls his wife, and laughs,
‘Behold no jealous husband! Take, enjoy,
And then return!’ Among the Alban hills,
Now in a flowery dressing-gown, and now
Booted and spurred, he stalks about his grounds,
All things discussing, and with strident voice
Outscreams the peacocks, with a hat more like
A contadino's than a Cardinal's.
From under dear Albani's purple peeps
The Colonel of Pontifical Dragoons;
A soldier yet at heart, real soldier once
Before his Uncle, Clement, grasped the keys,
And then, of course, his Eminence; but still
Prepared to die,—for what? For Art? Or, 'chance,
For Countess Cheroffini:—best of men,
Most loving and most lavish; yet at prayer,
Mass, Matins, Vespers, Lauds, punctilious
As mid-day cannon of Sant' Angelo;
And did you doubt the difference between
Contrition and Attrition, would be shocked
At such a lack of breeding.

“Every day,
One hour before along the city sounds
Ave Maria from the Capitol,
I in his coach escort my Cardinal
To the fair Countess: fair by courtesy,
Since fair she was, uncertain years ago,
When Alessandro in his virile prime
Clanked sword and spur, and every breast in Rome
Heaved at his coming! Chuckling gossips add,
‘One daughter is his double.’ On that theme
The babbler, love, is as discreet as death,
The cradle reticent as is the grave;
So whether friend or lover, Chi lo sà?
Believe which way you will. Who is it, says,
‘Short-memoried lust and long-remembering love’?
And he remembers: honour him for that.
He never empty-handed climbs her stair,
But either gem, antique intaglio,
Etruscan lamp or tazza, to her feet—
Belike it minds him of the bygone years
When he was not sole giver, and consoles
For grizzled embers,—tenders gallantly,
And she rejects not; for the Countess hath
That foible of the facile, graceful greed,
And thus the villa slowly strips of much
My faithfulness begrudges. True, to give
Is proof of nobleness, and only churls
Feel richer by refusing. But he gives,
She grasps, too heedlessly; and so, when asked
How to repair his gaping treasury,
I answered laughingly, ‘Your Eminence,
But burn the Cheroffini Palace down
And all within it, or alive or dead,
You shall be rich as Sallust.’

“Truly strange,
This fetter of the flesh, that maketh bond
Pontiff and bumpkin, clown and Emperor.
Love,—yes of father, mother, country, friend,
And most, of Art,—that I can understand.
But when they merrymake o'er Mengs's wife,—
He first descrying her, wise man, exclaimed,
‘Behold the very model that I want
For my Madonnas!’—and reproach me, ‘See!
How Margherita smiles upon you!’ Pheugh!
How little do they know me! Love, like Art,
Should live established in serenity;
A classic love, immortal because calm,
Not like the riotous imaginings
Of our Romantics, sprawling shapelessly
In perishable passion. Let me live
With fleshless forms voluptuously cold
In unexacting marble. But, to Greece!
Their sepulchres are there, and, at a stroke,
Ready to rend their cerements!