University of Virginia Library

WRITTEN IN NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S “TRANSFORMATION.”

I.

[O mightiest name of death! O awful Rome!]

O mightiest name of death! O awful Rome!
How has he writ in marble on thy hills
His presence! Death thy stony valleys fills;
There, with the ghostly past, he makes his home;
Yet, in the shadows of thy mighty dome,
What life eternal lives, a breath that stills
His boasts to dumbness, and, thy conqueror, kills.
Who breathe thy air, deathless henceforth become;
For ears that hear, thy lips have mystic lore:
To those who question thee in the weird might
Of genius, lo, thy thousand tongues restore
The spells that scare Oblivion to flight.
Greatness is in thy touch. Lo, here, once more
To one thou giv'st thy glory as his right.

II.

[Here is the life of Rome. The air of death]

Here is the life of Rome. The air of death,
Silence and solitude and awe are here;
Spectres of grandeur, at whose bygone breath
Earth still'd and trembled, from these leaves appear;
From these weird words steal wonder and strange fear,
An awful past, which he who listeneth
In solemn awe, with trembling heart may hear,
Hearing what from her stones the Bygone saith.
Here is the double life that haunts Rome's hills,
Power spelt in ruins—art that wreathes all time,
Beauty eternal which the rapt air fills
With reverence from fit souls from every clime.
Hawthorne, henceforth, here, with life's joys and ills,
Rome's thoughts are with me, and her dreams sublime.

III.

[“From evil, good; from sin and sorrow, peace]

“From evil, good; from sin and sorrow, peace,
A holier future and a loftier faith.”
This, to the soul, thy mystic volume saith,
Hawthorne, and bids Doubt's spectral night to cease,
Offering, from its dread gloom, what blest release!
If any say, “Evil accuses Him,
From whom is all, of evil,” here in dim
Wan characters is writ, “Good hath increase,
Even from the stifling ill with which it strives.
God's wisdom is not ours. From blackest ill,
Souls, sorrow-deepen'd, have won whitest lives.
Bless Him for all things. All things are His will:
His stroke the granite of our hearts but rives
That light may enter, and His ends fulfil.”