The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Thanks be to heaven! yon grove of sombre pines
Whose several tops, like feathers in one wing
Folded o'er one another, hang in air,
From the great City hides me! From its sound,

300

Low but mysterious, urgent, agitating,
Not distance only, but those rifted walls
Immense (how oft at noontide have I watched
The long green lizard from their fissures glance,
And glide from thicket-mantled tower to tower)
Not less protect me. Thanks once more to Heaven!
This nook in which I lie, this grassy isle
Amid the burnt brake nested, hath no name:
No legend haunts it. Unalarmed I turn,
Confronted by no despot from the grave,
By no inscription challenged. If this spot
Was trod of old by Consul or by King
It is my privilege to be ignorant:
They lived and died. If here the Roman Twins
Tugged at the she-wolf, they have had their day:
Yon lambs have theirs; and I, a wearied man,
Following the path their feet have worn, here find
Their cool recess, and share it. Pretty thrush!
Possess thy soul in peace, and sing at will,
Sharpening thy clear expostulating note,
Or softening, 'mid the branches. Murmuring stream
Sufficient to solicit and reward
An unconstrained attention, thou to me,
A lover of the torrents from my youth
This day art dearer far than Alpine floods
In whose abysmal voices all the sounds
Of all the vales are met and reconciled.
From admiration I desire repose;
Rest from that household foe, a beating heart;
Yea, from all thought exemption, save such thoughts
As, lightly wafted towards us, leave us lightly,
And, like the salutation of those winds
That curl yon ilex leaves, if sweets they bring,
Bequeath a sweeter freshness.

301

Three weeks since
To me this spot a prison-house had seemed,
And hours here spent ignoblest apathy.
The change, whence comes it? Fevered nights and days
Make answer! Answer thou, mysterious City,
Whose shade eclipsed the world a thousand years,
Till, in thy citizenship world-wide, the name
Of Man at last was lost: make answer, thou!
Tomb, aqueduct, and porch I visited,
And strove with adulating thoughts to clasp,
And could not: for as some vast tree, the sire
Of woods, flings off the span of infant arms,
So by its breadth and compass Rome rebuked
My sympathies. The ‘lesser,’ verily,
‘Is of the greater blessed;’ and Love, a gift,
Falls back, repulsed, from that which scorns its aid,
From that which, solitary in its vastness,
Admits no measurement, nor condescends
To be in portions grasped; from that which yields
No crevice to the climber's hand or foot;
Whose height o'erawes our wingèd aspirations
Like some steep cliff of ocean in whose shade
The circling sea-birds wail. And yet, too slight
With soul-unburdening love to clasp thee, Rome,
Much more was I unable to forget.
I mused in city wastes where pitying Earth
Takes back into her breast huge fragments strewn
Around, like bones of savage beasts extinct:
From wreck to wreck I roamed: my very dreams
Nested in obscure haunts and gloomy vaults:
Ruin on ruin pressed, rivals in death,
Like grave dislodging grave in churchyard choked:
Triumphant Pillar, and vainglorious Arch

302

Towered in blue sky: voluptuous Baths laid bare
Colossal Vice: and one great Temple meet
For that promiscuous worship Statecraft loves
Lifted its haughty dome and pillared front.
I sought Cornelia's house, but found instead
The Cæsars' Palace, and the Coliseum,
That theatre of blood, where sat enthroned,
Swollen with the rage of Roman merriment,
The Roman People—Earth's chief idol served
With human victims!

From its own excess
Triumphant Evil suffers confutation:
Not here where, tested by the extreme it reached,
The Imperial Instinct stands unmasked—not here
Can the sword's conquests subjugate the soul:
A lucid interval perforce is ours,
By these memorials quelled. The race that here
Trod down their brethren daily, in their day
Might plead some poor excuse. Each war to them
Some singular necessity might urge,
Or final peace impledge: but we who stand
Outfaced by all the congregated trophies
They reared that gloried in their shame, who pace
O'er Tullia's way to reach Domitian's halls,
Who in one choir behold the British Queen
And earlier Sabine maid, who hear at once
The wail of Veii and the falling roofs
Of Carthage, till monotonous becomes
The cry of nations, and the tale of blood
A tedious iteration; we who scan,
Marbled in Rome, the form of injured Earth,
Who round us mark trampled Humanity,

303

And trace her wounds, and count each accurate scar
In that dread victim by Rome's talon and beak
Grav'n and recorded—we are scantly moved
On martial sway to dote. What magic, then,
Draws us to Rome? What spirit bids the world
Send up its tribes to one Metropolis;
To her whom many hate—whom many fear—
Where lies the spell? Luxurious wealth has spread
No velvet o'er the Roman streets, nor hung
The spoils of Cashmeer, Persia, Samarcand,
On either side the way. No flattering dream
Of fame restored, and ancient life renewed,
Looks forth from heaven into a young man's eyes,
Then drops, and plants its tent on Tyber's bank:
The tawny Tyber is no mountain rill
Where Fancy slakes her thirst. The sage shrinks back,
And in the Roman Sibyl's bleeding book
Will read no line—
The future here is mortgaged to the past;
Hope breathes no temporal promise o'er that plain
On which malaria broods: amid the tombs
Her foot moves slowly; and where Hope is lame
The social forces languish.

Whence the spell
That draws us, then, to Rome? In arms, no more
It lives: abides it ambushed then in Art?
The reign of Art is over. To uprear
A prostrate column on its crumbling base—
Behold her chief of triumphs! Art is dead,
Here as in every land. In death gold-robed
Her soul-less body, stretched across the street,
Blocks up the public way. The artist's study,

304

Of old a hermit's cell, where Mind recluse,
Pillowed on stores aforetime wrung from Thought
By Passion, by Experience drawn from Life,
Saw visions as in Patmos, and set forth
The shapes it saw, is now a wrangling shop
In all the regal cities of the world,
For them that buy and sell. In ancient time
The painter was a preacher, whose sage hand
Changed Thought to Form. If Martyrdom that thought,
The radiant face of confessor unmoved
Expressed full well that death which is a birth
Into the realms of light. If Faith that thought,
Lo! where St. Jerome, eremite and Saint,
A dweller among rocks, himself a rock,
Wasted and gaunt, fast-worn, and vigil-blind,
Dying, draws near in faith, with both hands clasped,
And awe-struck lip, to Him the invisible,
And on that ‘Last Communion’ hanging, rests
The weight of all his being! If he mused
On Purity, ah! mark that seer (nor young,
Nor female) who a lily holds and reads
Writ in its depth the life white-robed of them
Who follow still the Lamb! How oft, how gladly,
On such fair picture, found in village church
Or loncliest convent, has my spirit fed!
But here in Rome, the centre once of Art,
Here, as elsewhere, her mission Art hath lost:
Her health is here in rank abundance drowned.
The living paint for profit. Pictures old
Are to vainglorious eminence reduced;
And, from the spots that gave them meaning torn,
In proud and blind confusion hang round halls
Where vanity sits umpire. Art of old,

305

Handmaid of Faith—prophet that witness bare
Of God, not self, nor came in her own name,
Initiate in the Ideal Truth that spans
The actual scope of things, and thence advanced
To be great Nature's meek Interpreter,
Stands now a conquering Queen, and keeps her court
In palace halls whose marble labyrinths
Are cities peopled by a race of stone.
In such what profit? Breathlessly we turn,
And sigh for stillness, sigh for utter peace,
For darkness, or assuasive twilight drawn
In dewy gentleness o'er pastures broad
Whose cool serenity of blue and green
Lures the tense spirit forth, and in a bath
Of relaxation soft soothes and contents it
Too much of ostentatious aid unasked!
Are we so weak within? Can we advance
No step without a crutch? No lessons learn,
Save lessons thrust upon us? Can we find
In Nature's music manifold no voice
But sad confessions of her nothingness?
Trust we in dead things only? Nature lives!
Her moving clouds, the rapture of her waves,
Her rural haunts domestic, nooks sun-warmed
Endeared to babe and greybeard, her expanse
Of fruitful plains, with hamlet, hall, and tower,
Homestead and hedge, in autumn's glistening air
Drawn out at eve, or by the ferment dazed
Of summer sunrise, or on vernal noon
Melting in pearly distance like our dreams
For Man's far welfare—her mysterious glens
That with the substance of one shade are thronged
And others habitant have none, that speak
Of God and God alone, transfix the heart

306

With wisdom less imposed on man than won
From man's resources. Nature's demonstrations,
Maternal, not scholastic, need have none
Of diagram: her own face is their proof,
Subduing in the pathos of its smiles,
Or power of eye: and, being, infinite,
Her life is all in every part; her lore
In lowliest shape is perfect. Thou frail flower,
Anemone! that near my grassy couch,
By a breath shaken which I scarcely feel,
Thy gracious head as though in worship bowest
Down on thy mother's lap, in thee, in thee
(I seek no further) lives that Power supreme,
Whereof the artists boast. Immaculate Beauty
In thy humility doth dominate,
Is of thy tremblings proud, and, gladly clothed
In thy thin garb of colours and fair forms,
Looks up and smiles. I pluck thee from thy bed—
Lie lightly on a breast that weary grows
Of haughtier burdens! Cool a fevered heart,
That seeking better things hath sought in vain!
Be thou my monitor: let me sum up:
What have I chiefly learned from human life?
That life as brief as thine is to be praised:
That life's best blessings are the flower-like joys
We spurn unseen, chasing inventions vain:
That He who made thee, made the heavens and earth,
And man; and that in Him is life alone;
To serve Him freedom and to know Him peace—
Thine ancestress that bloomed in Paradise
Possessed no softer voice to celebrate,
Joining the visual chorus of all worlds,
Her great Creator's glory!

307

Hark that peal!
From countless domes that high in sunlight shake
A thousand bells roll forth their harmonies:
The City, by the noontide flame oppressed,
And sheltered long in sleep, awakes. Even now,
Along the Pincian steep, with youthful step
To dignity subdued, collegiate trains
Precede their dark-stoled Teachers. Courts grassgrown
That echoed long some fountain's lonely splash,
Now ring more loudly, smitten by the wheels
Of prince, or prelate of the Church intent
On some majestic Rite. That peal again!
And now the linked Procession moves abroad,
Untwining slowly its voluminous folds:
It pauses: through the dusky archway drawn
It vanishes: upcoiled at last, and still,
Girdling the Coliseum's central Cross,
The sacred Pageant rests. With motion soft
So slid the Esculapian snake of old
Forth from the darkness. In Hesperian isle
So rested, coiled around the mystic stem,
The Watcher of the fruit. The day draws on:
The multitudinous thrill of quickening life
Vibrates through all the city: it prevails
In convent walks by rustling robe trailed o'er;
Like hum of insects unbeheld it throbs
Through orange-scented, cloistral gardens dim;
It deepens with the concourse onward borne
Between those statued Saints that guard thy bridge,
St. Angelo, and past the Adrian Tomb
Where at the Church's foot an Empire sleeps;
It swells within those Colonnades whose arms
Receive once more the concourse from all lands—

308

The stately English noble, student pale
From Germany, diplomatist from France,
Far Grecian Patriarch, or Armenian priest,
Or Royal Exile. From thy marble roofs,
St. Peter's, in whose fastnesses abide,
Like Arab tribe encamped, the bands ordained
To guard them from the aggressive elements,
From those aërial roofs to whispering depths
Of crypt where kneels the cowlèd monk alone,
The murmur spreads like one broad wind that lifts,
Ere morn the sighing shrouds of fleet becalmed:
The churches fill; the relics forth are brought:
Screened by rich fretwork the monastic apse
Resounds the hoarse chant like an ocean cave:
And long ere yet those obelisks, which once
Shadowed the Nile, o'er courts Basilican
Project their evening shades, like silver stars
Before white altars glimmering lights shall burn,
And solitary suppliants lift their hands
To Christ, for ever Present, to His Saints,
And to His Martyrs, whom the Catacombs
Hid in their sunless bosoms.

Rome, O Rome!
Surely thy Strength is here! Three hundred years
Thy Faithful lived, and watched among the Tombs;
The Catacombs were their Metropolis:
There in the darkness thirty Pontiffs ruled;
And died, save two, by martyrdom. The Rite,
Dread and tremendous, yoking earth and heaven,
The Christian Sacrifice, was offered there,
A tomb the altar, and, for relics, blood
Of him who last confessed. The pictured walls
To Mary and to Peter witness still.

309

Here is thy Strength, O Rome! Sun-clad, above,
The Emperor triumphed, and the People triumphed!
The Nubian lion, and the Lybian pard
Roared for their prey! Above thy tawny wave,
Tyber, the world's increase went up each day:
Daily from Rome the Legions passed whose arms
Flashed back in turn the sunrise of all lands:
Through every gate the embassies of Kings
Advanced with gifts. But in the Catacombs
Thy Faithful watched, and, circled by their dead,
Worshipped their God in peace. Three hundred years
Passed like three days: and lo! that Power went forth
Which conquered Death. Then Hell gave up her prey:
That hour the kingdoms of this world became
The kingdoms of the Lord, and of His Christ:
The Prince of this world, from his throne, upreared
On subject thrones of every land, was hurled:
The Pagan victories then their meaning found:
That Empire last and mightiest which absorbed
All its precursors, lay a ruin: God
His family on earth a Kingdom made
And Sion built on buried Babylon!
The Sacrament of Obedience paid to God
Through Man, His Vicar, glorified that hour,
Subjection; and the Apostles reigned at Rome,
Reigned from their tombs, and conquered from their dust!
Behold the mystery of the ages! Man
Wrought it, unconscious! History is mad
Or finds its meaning here. One Mystery vast
Solves here Philosophy's uncounted riddles:

310

Time with its tumults here is harmonized:
Hope here is found or nowhere!

As a mist
That strives no longer, swept by quiring winds
From some peak'd mountain, my oppression leaves me!
Great Rome is mine at last! Refreshed I rise;
And gales of life from that celestial bourne
Whereto we tend strike on me. With soft shock
Yon almond bower lets falls its rose-touched snow:
The sun is setting. The despotic Day
Which, blessing earth with increase, suffered none
To lift a grateful eye, hath heard his doom,
And round him folds his robes, blood-stained and golden,
With dignity to die. Like haughty hopes
From one reduced by sickness, from the clouds
Their pageantries are passing; and ere long
No hue save that translucent, tender green,
Will speak of pomps gone by. The increasing wind,
Incumbent on the pine-grove's summit broad,
Gathers in volumed strength: within its vaults
An omnipresent and persistent whisper
Waxes in loudness. Well, might I believe
The hosts angelic, who with guardian care,
Urging belike the seasons in their course,
Circle the earth, even now on wings outspread
Were rustling o'er me, countless as sea-sands!
Glorious and blessed Armies! free ye are
From man's uncertainties, and free not less
From man's illusions! Passing in one flight
Calpë and Athens—all that makes renowned
This many-mountained, many-citied globe,

311

To you our schemes of worldly rule must seem
Like some poor maniac's towers in charcoal sketched,
Airy possession, on his cell's bare wall,
Our science like that knowledge won from touch
By one born blind, our arts like gems minute,
Poor fragments crumbled from your spheres eterne!
Pity us, then, bright Spirits, for ye know
The weakness of our strength; the poverty
Ye know, which we for wealth misdeem—exchanging
The gold of Truth Immutable and One,
Shared, not divided, for the baser coin
Of Truth in portions, scattered through the world.
Ye know the sad vacuity of hearts
With trifles filled, and thence from Him averse
In love for Whom is clasped the love of all things,
And their possession. Starlike in your ken,
By distance, and the barriers of the realms,
And all that haze which men call ancientness,
Unfooled ye are. For you the Church of God
Unwrinkled as the ocean, wears for aye
Her Pentecostal glory. All things that live,
And die not—all Realities divine,
Live in the light of one eternal Now,
And prime perpetual. Him whom we revere
As patriarch, ye behold a white-haired babe,
Poor, heaven-protected infant of fourscore:
His course accomplished, still in him ye note
His mother's new delight—a bud dried up;
Dropt from the human stem at noon; ere night
Blown forth into the darkness. Spirits blest!
The sun that runs before you rises ever:
For ever sets, reigns ever throned at noon;
Past, Present, Future mingle in your sight,
And Time its tortuous stream spreads to a lake

312

Girt by, and imaging, Eternity,
Between whose mirror and the infinite vault
Ye in the radiance bask!

Bask on, bright Spirits!
Bathe in the beam of Godhead; or fulfil
With awe your ministries of love, in Man
That seeing which they saw not who of old
The Galilean mocked. By death absolved,
By perfected Obedience rendered free,
Man—by the old-world Empires trod to dust,
Man—by the Prince of this world crowned and mocked,
Man o'er the ruins of the world shall rise;
Yea, from the height of heaven, the throne of God,
Shall gaze upon a universe renewed;
His Image o'er that universe shall cast
And o'er your shining hosts; his hand shall raise;
And with the Voice Supreme blending his own,
Shall bless you, and pronounce you ‘very good.’

The Pantheon.

University of Virginia Library

A WANDERER'S MUSINGS AT ROME.