The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

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.

409

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!

Napoleon got Nice and Savoy; Victor Emanuel, the Northern Papal States and Lombardy. It was a ‘Ten Years' War,’ before ‘Troy fell.’

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,

410

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!

Ancona, etc. The French Emperor had solemnly guaranteed the remaining Papal territory against invasion.

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?

411

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:

412

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.’

413

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.

414

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!

415

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

416

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!

417

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.

University of Virginia Library

I. PART I. The Revolt against Christian Civilization.

I. CHRISTMAS EVE, 1859.