SONNETS WRITTEN IN TRAVEL.
I.
GIOTTO'S CAMPANILE AT FLORENCE.
Enchased with precious marbles, pure and rare,
How gracefully it soars, and seems the while
From every polished stage to laugh and smile,
Playing with gleams of that clear southern air!
Fit resting-place methinks its summit were
For a descended Angel! happy isle
Mid life's rough sea of sorrow, force, and guile,
For Saint of royal race, or vestal fair,
In this seclusion—call it not a prison—
Cloistering a bosom innocent and lonely:
O Tuscan Priestess! gladly would I watch
All night one note of thy loud hymn to catch
Sent forth to greet the sun, when first, new-risen,
He shines on that aërial station only!
II.
OLD PICTURES AT FLORENCE.
Thrice happy they who thus before man's eyes
Restored the placid image of his prime;
Illustrating th' abortive shows of Time
With gleams authentic caught from Paradise.
Those Godlike forms are men! Impure disguise
By us now suffered! O for wings to climb
Once more to Virtue's mountain seats sublime,
And be what here we poorly recognise!
From these fair pictures our Humanity
Looks down upon us kindly. 'Tis no dream:
Truth stands attested by Consistency;
And all the Virtues here in peace supreme
So meet, so blend, that in those Forms we see,
The sum of all we are and fain would be.
III.
ON A PICTURE BY COREGGIO AT PARMA.
Paint thou the pearl gates of the Morning Star,
Loftiest of Painters, and the loveliest;
For only of thy pencil worthy are
Those ever-smiling mansions of the blest!
Thyself when homeward summoned to thy rest
Couldst scarce have marked our earth's receding bar:
No happier shapes could greet thee, near or far,
Than oft in life thy radiant fancy drest.
God, when He framed the earth, beheld it good:
The light from His approving smile that shone
For thee waned never from her features wan:
Before thine eyes—unfallen if unrenewed—
Still moved that Race supreme and fairest made;
And Love and Joy, twin stars, still on their foreheads played.
IV.
COREGGIO'S CUPOLAS AT PARMA.
Creatures all eyes and brows, and tresses streaming,
By speed divine blown back:—within, all fire
Of wondering zeal, and storm of bright desire;
Round the broad dome the immortal throngs are beaming:
With elemental Powers the vault is teeming:
We gaze, and, gazing, join the fervid choir,
In spirit launched on wings that ne'er can tire,
Like those that buoy the breasts of children dreaming.
The exquisitest hand that e'er in light
Revealed the subtlest smile of new-born pleasure,
Here sounds the abysses, and attains the height,
Is strong the strength of heavenly hosts to measure,
Draws back the azure curtain of the skies,
And antedates our promised Paradise.
V.
TO ITALY.
O Italy, how beautiful thou wert,
If in thee dwelt an answerable soul!
Fair in each feature, perfect in each part,
That, that thou lack'st which should inspire the whole:
Thine are all gifts of nature, all of art;
Yet a slow sadness we cannot control
Steals, as we gaze, o'er the dejected heart,
And our checked passion meets too soon its goal.
Beyond the mark of Virtue thou hast shot
(For only Virtue's ornaments are thine)
And so fallen short of Greatness. Solid Thought,
Strength, courage, prudence—all, save Truths divine,
Thou hast corrupted. Therefore falls thy hand,
Prone, and unsceptred of its old command.
VI.
GENOA.
Ah! what avails it, Genoa, now to thee
That Doria, feared by monarchs, once was thine?
Univied ruin! in thy slow decline
From virtuous greatness, what avails that he
Whose prow descended first the Hesperean sea,
And gave our world her mate beyond the brine,
Was nurtured, whilst an infant, at thy knee?
All things must perish—all but things divine.
Flowers, and the stars, and Virtue; these alone,
The self-subsisting shapes, or self-renewing,
Survive. All else are sentenced. Wisest were
That builder who should plan with strictest care
Ere yet the wood was felled or hewn the stone,
The aspect only of his pile in ruin!
VII.
A PICTURE BY ANDREA DEL SARTO, IN THE CATHEDRAL OF PISA.
Are there not virtues which we know not of,
By men unnamed because not met with here,
Perchance too lofty for this lowly sphere,
Our great and glorious heritage above,
Yet here in virtues which we know and love
Dimly foreshown? Thus dimly to the seer,
Rehearsed in humbler kinds that round us move
The sovran attributes of man appear.
Madonna! I have hung day after day
On thy strange beauty with a devout eye;
And now, all marvel, rapture, ecstasy
Rebuked, or harmonised, or worn away,
I gaze; and ask what I have asked; and stay
Lingering, and vainly hoping a reply.
VIII.
THE RENAISSANCE, AND SAVONAROLA.—1.
Painter, that on these sacred convent walls
The symbols paintest of the fleeting Hours,
Reserve thine art, poor spoil from Pagan bowers,
To deck withal the rich man's secular halls!
Are these the Hours? aërial Bacchanals
With urn down-bent or basket heaped with flowers,
Through sunshine borne, light Zephyr's paramours?
—Thralls though we be, we are not Pleasure's thralls!
When God with thunder and his prophet's voice
The temples where of old he chose to dwell
Chooses to shake in judgment, cleanse or quell,
How impious sounds thy summons to rejoice!
Erase thy work; kneel on the tombstones bare:
Thine eye with fastings purge: make firm thy hand with prayer.
IX.
THE RENAISSANCE, AND SAVONAROLA.—2.
Then rise, and paint the Hours; and launch them forth
Like sequent arrows hurled from God's right hand,
Or eagles of the ocean borne to earth
By solid storm their wings no more withstand:
Yet, calm in speed, a stern, predestined band,
In meditative might or gloomy mirth
Speed them, dread forms of elemental birth;
And let one bear the trump, and one the brand.
Fix thou their mighty eyes the dark locks under
Massed o'er their fervid foreheads, like a cloud
Whose heart is flame: and be their faces bowed,
As though they listened to unsleeping thunder;
The breaking of the billows of Time's sea
On the far confines of Eternity.
X.
FRESCOES BY MASACCIO, AT FLORENCE.
Well hast thou judged that sentence, ‘Had ye Faith,
Ye could move mountains.’ In those forms I see
What God at first created man to be;
His image crowned, triumphant over death.
Born of that Word which never perisheth
Those Prophets here resume the empery
By sin in Eden lost. Their eye, their breath
Cancels disease; lays prone the anarchy
Of Passion's fiercest waves. Secret as Fate,
Like Fate's the powers they wield are infinite:
Their very thoughts are laws: their will is weight:
On as they move in majesty and might
The demons yield their prey, the graves their dead:
And to her centre Earth is conscious of their tread.
XI.
SAINTS BY PIETRO PERUGINO.
Glory to God of all fair things the maker
For that He dwelleth in the mind of Man!
Glory to Man of that large grace partaker
For that he storeth thus his spirit's span
With shapes our earth creates not, neither can,
Till, like a flood, her vanished youth o'ertake her,
And heaven's ‘New Song’ to loftier labours wake her,
High artist then, as now poor artisan.
Mark, mark those awful sons of Martyrdom,
With their uplifted hands, but eyes down-cast.
As though the uncreated light had dazed them:—
The error of our brief existence past
They stand like Saints resurgent from the tomb,
Suspended still on that great Voice which raised them!
XII.
PICTURE OF A SAINT.
Dark, infinitely dark, a midnight blue
Those orbs that, resting on the skies, appear
To pierce the veil of Heaven and wander through,
Searching the centre of the starry sphere.
Angels, be sure, unseen are hovering near!
Their fanning plumes with faintest blush imbue
That pearly cheek, a lily else in hue,
And from that brow the auburn tresses clear.
One hand is laid upon her mantled breast
To us an unrevealèd paradise,
Nor bodied in the ascetic Painter's dream:
Hidden it lies in everlasting rest
Beneath those purple robes that earthward stream
Cyphered with star-emblazoned mysteries.
XIII.
A NIGHT ON THE GENOESE RIVIERA.
Fanned by sweet airs the road along the cliff
Wound in the moonlight, glistening now, now dim;
So winds a silver snake in pale relief
Girdling a sacrificial beaker's brim:
Black rocks loomed forth in giant hieroglyph
O'er silken seas: amid their shadows grim
From lowly town dim-lit, or dancing skiff,
At times the song was borne, at times the hymn.
Star after star adown the blue vault sliding
Their bright hair washed successive in the wave,
Till morning, from her far purpureal cave
Issuing, and o'er the foamless billows gliding,
Leaped, as the bells rang out from tower and shrine,
Up from her sea-bath to the hills of pine.
XIV.
BOCCACCIO AND CERTALDO.
The world's blind pilgrims, tendering praise for blame,
Passing Certaldo, point and smile and stare
And with Boccaccio's triumph din the air:—
Ah, but for him how high had soared thy fame,
Italian Song! False Pleasure is a flame
That brands the Muses' pleasaunce; burns it bare
As some volcanic isle with barren glare:
O Italy! exult not in thy shame!
'Twas here, 'twas here thy Song's immortal river
Lost its last sight of hoar Parnassus' head,
And swerved through flowery meads to sandy bar:
Its saintly mission here it spurned for ever:
It sighed to Laura, and with Tancred bled:
But caught no second flash from Dante's star!
XV.
THE CAMPO SANTO AT PISA.—1.
There needs not choral song, nor organs pealing:
This mighty cloister of itself inspires
Thoughts breathed like hymns from spiritual choirs;
While shades and lights, in soft succession stealing,
Along it creep, now veiling, now revealing
Strange forms, here traced by Painting's earliest sires,
Angels with palms; and purgatorial fires;
And Saints caughtup, and demons round them reeling.
Love, long remembering those she could not save,
Here hung the cradle of Italian Art:
Faith rocked it; hence, like hermit child, went forth
That heaven-born Power which beautified the earth:
She perished when the world had lured her heart
From her true friends, Religion and the grave.
XVI.
THE CAMPO SANTO AT PISA.—2.
Lament not thou: the cold winds, as they pass
Through the ribbed fret-work with low sigh or moan,
Lament enough; let them lament alone,
Counting the sere leaves of the innumerous grass
With thin, soft sound like one prolonged—‘alas!’
Spread thou thy hands on sun-touched vase, or stone
That yet retains the warmth of sunshine gone,
And drink warm solace from the ponderous mass.
Gaze not around thee. Monumental marbles,
Time-clouded frescoes, mouldering year by year,
Dim cells in which all day the night-bird warbles,
These things are sorrowful elsewhere, not here:
A mightier Power than Art's hath here her shrine:
Stranger! thou tread'st the soil of Palestine!
XVII.
TASSO'S HOUSE AT SORRENTO.
O Leonora, here thy Tasso dwelt,
Secure, ere yet thy beauty he had seen:
Here with bright face and unterrestrial mien
He walked, ere yet thy shadow he had felt:
From that green rock he watched the sunset melt,
On through the waves: yon cavern was his screen
When first those hills, which gird the glowing scene,
Were thronged with heavenly warriors, and he knelt
To hail the vision! Syren baths to him
Were nothing; Pagan grot, or classic fane,
Or glistening pavement seen through billows dim:
Far, far o'er these he gazed on Judah's plain,
And more than manhood wrought was in the boy—
Why did the Stranger meddle in his joy?
XVIII.
CASTELAMARE.
O cool and healthful nights! O peaceful gloom!
O winding sands that in your beauteous zone
Clasp the dim watery plain, how oft alone
I paced your marge, inhaling the perfume
Which forests bursting with invisible bloom
Poured from their mountain ambush! Moon was none:
But with such strength the lamp of Venus shone,
Descending nightly over Virgil's tomb,
That, like the moonbeam, her long lustre lay
On distant waves to meet that radiance swelling;
A long bright ladder from the Star of Love
Touched, as it seemed, our lower world. Above,
The nightingale her sorrows wept away;
And all the echoes of her wrong were telling.
XIX.
A MORNING AT SALERNO.
Our hearts heaved slowly as that deep blue flood
Along whose marge we paced. More darkly blue,
Through lines of poplars gleaming on our view,
The violet crescent of the mountains stood:
Unblemished morning, shy as Maidenhood,
Rose blushing from the waves, and round us threw
A gradual halo, reddening through its dew
The silvery greenness of the willow wood—
Small clouds unnumbered swollen with golden glories
Swam in succession long of lucent fleeces
O'er all the ocean-isles and promontories;—
That old-world Faith, which sees whate'er it pleases,
Had deemed Saint Agnes up the heavenly Eden
Her mild immaculate flock was gently leading!
XX.
TO NAPLES.
Queen of the sunny South, in grace reclined
O'er thy voluptuous bath, and warmed for ever
By beams that make thy nerves in rapture shiver,
From yonder Syren Islands silver-shrined
Smiles, such as strike the loftier vision blind,
Beckoning to thee each morning shoot and quiver:
They sting the languor of thine amorous fever:
And Syren voices swell each passing wind.
But from the other coast, and yet more near,
The Sibyl's whisper, with that music bent,
Creeps slowly o'er the waters. Hear, O hear!
She speaks of buried cities, mountains rent;
Of Pleasure stifled in her mid career,
Fire-lifted isle, and fire-drowned continent!
XXI.
THE SIBYL'S CAVE AT CUMA.
Cumæan Sibyl! from thy sultry cave
Thy dark eyes level with the sulph'rous ground
Through the gloom flashing, roll in wrath around!
What see they? Coasts perpetual Earthquakes pave
With ruin; piles half buried in the wave;
Wrecks of old times in later lava drowned;—
And festive crowds, sin-steeped and myrtle-crowned,
Like idiots dancing on a Parent's grave.
And they foresee. Those pallid lips with pain
Suppress their thrilling whispers. Sibyl, spare!
Could Wisdom's voice divide yon sea, and scare
With some Vesuvius new its flaming plane,
Futile the warning! Power despised! forbear
To deepen guilt by counsel breathed in vain!
XXII.
THE RUINS OF CORNELIA'S HOUSE AT BAIA.
I turn from ruins of imperial power,
Tombs of corrupt delight, old walls the pride
Of statesmen pleased for respite brief to hide
Their laurell'd foreheads in the Muse's bower,
And seek Cornelia's home. At sunset's hour
How oft her eyes, that wept no more, descried
Yon purpling hills! how oft she heard that tide
Fretting as now low cave or hollow tower!
The mother of the Gracchi—Scipio's child—
'Twas virtue such as hers that built her Rome!
Never towards it she gazed! Far off, her home
She made, like her great Father self-exiled.
Woe to the nations when the souls they bare,
Their best and bravest, choose their rest elsewhere!
XXIII.
VENICE BY DAY.
The splendour of the Orient, here of old
Throned with the West upon a waveless sea,
Her various-vested, resonant jubilee
Maintains, though Venice hath her freedom sold:
In their high stalls of azure and of gold
Yet stand, above the servile concourse free,
Those brazen steeds the Car of Victory
Hither from far Byzantium's porch that rolled.
The wingèd Lions, Time's dejected thralls,
Glare with furled plumes. The pictured shapes that glow
Like sunset clouds condensed upon the walls
Still boast old wars, or feasts of long ago:
And still the sun his amplest glory pours
On all those swelling domes and ocean floors.
XXIV.
VENICE IN THE EVENING.
Alas! mid all this pomp of the ancient time,
And flush of modern pleasure, dull Decay
O'er the bright pageant breathes her shadow grey:
As on from bridge to bridge I roam and climb
It seems as though some wonder-working chime,
Whose spell that pageant raised and still can sway,
To some far source were ebbing fast away;
As though, by man unheard, with voice sublime
It bade the sea-born Queen of Cities follow
Her Sire into his ocean realm far down—
Beneath my fleet the courts sound vast and hollow;
And more than Evening's darkness seems to frown
On sable barks that, swift yet trackless, fleet
Like dreams o'er dim lagune and water-street.
XXV.
LEONARDO'S ‘LAST SUPPER’ AT MILAN.
Come! if thy heart be pure, thy spirits calm,
If thou hast no dark memories, or but those
Pure self-reproach inflicts—ah no, bestows;
Her wounds, here probed, find here their gentlest balm.
O the sweet sadness of that lifted palm!
The dreadful Deed to come His lips disclose:
Yet love and awe, not wrath, that count'nance shows,
As though they sang even now that ritual psalm
Which closed the Feast piacular. Time hath done
His work on this fair picture; but that Face
His outrage awes. Stranger! the mist of years,
Between thee hung and half its heavenly grace,
Hangs there, a fitting veil; nor that alone—
They see it best who see it through their tears!
XXVI.
THE CHURCH OF ST. AMBROSE AT MILAN.
Here still remains the Apostolic Chair
Whence good Saint Ambrose, patriarchal man,
Thy spiritual sceptre swayed, Milan!
Yonder the Font, divine Augustine, where
The life that never ends for thee began;
And—near as death to life—behold them there!
Those Gates, to him the portals of despair,
Whose closing spake the blood-stained Emperor's ban.
He, the world's master, and her lord, as one
By lightning smitten on his noon-tide throne,
Fell from his pride, and without speech departed:
While thou, dejected Afric's humblest son,
To seats a Mother's tears had made thine own
With regal step didst mount, no longer feeble-hearted.
XXVII.
THE STATUE OF ST. CARLO BORROMEO AT ARONA.
True fame is this;—through love, and love alone,
To stand thus honour'd where we first saw day:
True puissance this; the hand of lawful sway
In love alone to lift, that hand whereon,
Dove-like, Eternal Peace hath fixed her throne,
And whence her blessing wings o'er earth its way;—
True rule to God belongs. Who share it? They
Through whom God's gifts on human kind are strewn.
Bless thus thy natal place, great Priest, for ever!
And thou, Arona, by thy placid bay
Second thy sleepless Shepherd's mute endeavour.
The choice is thine, if that high Grace, like showers
Of sunbeams rain'd on all thy hearths and bowers,
Shall feed thy growth, or quicken thy decay!
XXVIII.
THE MILANESE SCHOOL.
What memory of a being ere his birth
Possessed Luini with the idea strange
Of that Sibylline beauty? Hall or grange,
Palace or Hut, whate'er we know on earth,
Holds nothing like it. Sadness here and mirth
So blend, or so into each other range,
We deem them ancient foemen that exchange
Love-vows, and sit henceforth beside one hearth.
Those half-closed eyes with mournful penetration
Look on through all things; yet a furtive smile
Brightens her thin, smooth, shadowy face the while:—
Methinks that subtle-visaged creature hears
The narrowing thread of Life in soft gyration
Drawn out; or closing of the Parcæ's shears!
XXIX.
THE CATHEDRAL OF MILAN.
With steps subdued, silence, and labour long,
I reached the marble roofs: A we vanquished dread:—
White shone they as the summit of Mont Blanc
When noontide parleys with that mountain's head:
The far-off Alps, by morning tinged with red,
Blushed through the spires that round in myriads sprung:
A silver gleam the wind-stirred poplars flung
O'er Lombardy's green sea below me spread.
Of these I little saw. In trance I stood,
Ere death, methought, admitted to the skies:
Around me, like a heavenly multitude
Crowning some specular mount of Paradise,
Thronged that Angelic Concourse robed in stone.
The sun, ascending, in their faces shone!
XXX.
BYZANTINE MOSAICS AT RAVENNA.
Traced on dim gold, in azure vaults enshrined,
Dreary adornments of each glaring space,
Those figures lean lack not a terrible grace!
Like cloud-rack dragged along the wintry wind
Forth stream at large their grey locks unconfined:
A vulture's foot each hand might seem: each face
Reports of wilds where, 'mid the ferine race,
Couched hungry seers and prophets vigil-blind.
Rocks, forests, caves, before me rise austere!
And that strong Church in childhood wandering wide,
By visions nursed, by tempests lullabied:
And hymns of warlike blast I seem to hear;
Victorious hymns no pen of scribe records:—
Fly, scattered Fiends! stand back, terrestrial Lords!
XXXI.
TO A MOUNTAIN IN SWITZERLAND.—1.
From all the glittering towers and spires star-bright
That fret thy crystal bastions far below,
With what an awful grace yon dome of snow
Ascends, and, swelling, grows upon our sight,
White as an infant's spirit, or the might
Of grey hairs in a monarch! Soft and slow
Dark clouds across thy Pine-wood vesture flow,
But touch not, mountain king, that sovran height.
The avalanche, borne down in rocky flood,
Thunders unechoed 'mid those seats divine:
And heaven's great diadem of starry globes
Is all thou seest, for thine own white robes
Cancel the world—Never shall foot of mine
Assail the region of thy solitude!
XXXII.
TO A MOUNTAIN IN SWITZERLAND.—2.
Lead to this spot Ambition's outcast son,
With unslaked hopes burning from youth to age;
That snowy vault, its latest crimson flown,
With cold aspèct his fever shall assuage:
Lead hither him who, captive in the cage
Of love remembered when the loved is gone,
Feeds on one thought, and that a poisonous one;
Haply that free expanse may disengage
His heart from earth—that region whence there seems
To heaven but one step only. To this spot
Be thou, bewildered maniac, also brought;
Gaze on that calmness, and forget thy dreams,
While noontide slumbers on its breezeless height,
While kissed by rose-lipped Morn, or crowned by starry Night.
XXXIII.
TO A MOUNTAIN IN SWITZERLAND.—3.
The Spirits of the midnight and noonday
On thee, hoar Mount, obsequiously attend;
Within thy skirts shadow and sunlight play;
And the stars hail thee as their earthly friend:
From their immortal charge the Twins descend;
The Plough awhile forgets his heavenly way;
The Pleiads from their shining cloisters stray;
And the crowned Archer doth his bow unbend.
Thy vastness draws the sphere above thee nearer:
—Or is it that our hearts by thee are raised;
And, strengthened thus, delight with vision clearer
To pore on starry wonders unamazed,
Earth's noblest shape forsaking for the sky,
As life when sweetest makes it sweet to die?
XXXIV.
THE CHAPEL OF TELL ON THE LAKE LUCERNE.
On this green platform with its chapel small
Embowered, the centre of the mountain land,
Take, holy Freedom, take for aye thy stand;
And hither from all regions ever call
Thy sons to thy perpetual festival:
Or bid them drink, a sacramental band,
From Grutli's founts, that rose at thy command
There where the three Deliverers vowed the fall
Of Powerunjust. Nightheard those whispered tones;—
Have they not found large echoes in the world?
Have they not been like God's own thunder hurled
In ruin down on all opprobrious thrones?
All sway that, deifying lawless might,
On that doth build, and not on God and on the right?
XXXV.
THE LAKE OF LUCERNE.
In shape a Cross, and walled with cliffs so high
That o'er each aisle of that quadruple plain
No unfit roof appears the vaulted sky,
It lies, a vast and crystal-paven fane,
A Church, by Nature built, and not in vain
Among the shadowing Mountains; to supply
For all thy sons and suppliants, Liberty,
A shrine of ample girth, and free from stain.
But thou, O Freedom! bid them gaze with fear
And love, upon Tell's birthplace, not on thee!
An awful thing art thou, not less than dear:
Unpurged no eye thy form unveiled should see:
Temples their hearts should be who hope to gain thee—
The sword may win, but Virtue must retain thee!
XXXVI.
How bright, how calm, how gentle, and how great
The soul should grow, ere yet for such a scene,
So sweet, so pure, so lofty, so serene,
It were an equal or an answering mate!
All day upon my heart there hung a weight;
And whence I knew not. Beauty seemed to lean,
Heavy for once, upon a breast, I ween,
Till now to catch her faintest smile elate.
But now the cause of that depression known,
The pain itself has left me; rather say,
In aspiration upward it has flown
From the dark altar of this heart of clay:
And I tread firmly, though by conscience chidden,
A guest permitted—yet a guest unbidden.
XXXVII.
THE MOUNTAIN MUSE.
Where shall we spread the couch of thy repose,
For here below thou find'st no worthy dwelling?
Rise then where Alp o'er Alp, like clouds up-swelling,
Above th' attempt of eagle's wing enclose
Inviolate spaces of suspended snows:
There, while the floods far down are faintly knelling,
And hooded Evening, star by star, is telling
Her rosary dim-seen through skies of rose,
There, thy large eyes stedfast and open keeping,
Olympia, rest! what time in mournful choir
The mighty winds, through endless pinewoods sweeping,
Draw from those chords, their melancholy lyre,
Eolian tones of elemental weeping,
And the last gleams of dying day expire.
XXXVIII.
THE BLUE GENTIAN.
With heart not yet half rested from Mont Blanc,
O'er thee, small flower, my wearied eyes I bent,
And rested on that humbler vision long:
Is there less beauty in thy purple tent
Outspread, perchance a boundless firmament,
O'er viewless myriads which beneath thee throng,
Than in that Mount whose sides, with ruin hung,
Frown o'er black glen and gorges thunder-rent?
Is there less mystery? Wisely if we ponder,
Thine is the mightier! Life, dread Power, in thee
Is strong as in cherubic wings that wander
Searching the limits of Infinity,
Life, life to be transmitted, not to expire
Till yonder snowy vault shall melt in the last fire!
XXXIX.
THE MOUNTAIN LANGUAGE.
Silent to watch great rivers at their rise,
And downward track them to the murmuring deep;
The sunlit storm to follow as it flies
Broken through purple glens; in lingering sweep
To hear the forest sigh, the torrent leap;
These things, great Nature's tragic agonies,
What lesson teach they which the soul should prize
As precious, and the memory strive to keep?
‘Lift up your hearts!’ O strange and mystic words!
Sounds truly eucharistic! Nothing mean
Is heard in them, or common, or unclean.
This is the mountain language. Sense affords
The instrumental medium: but the Spirit
Draws near in faith; and God, that hour, is near it!
XL.
A TYROLESE VILLAGE.
This village, thronged with churches, needeth none:
Each house, like some old missal rich and quaint,
Is blazoned o'er with prophet, seer, and saint:
Each court and street a sanctity hath won:
Here a great Angel stands, crowned with the sun:
Magdalene there pours her perpetual plaint:
There o'er her child the Maiden without taint
Bends—as His mercy bends o'er worlds undone.
Of earth's proud centres none like this recalls
That mystic City in the realms supernal
Built upon God; whose light is God alone:
The very stones cry out: the eloquent walls
Plainly confess that Name the proud disown;
The Father's glory, and the Son Eternal.
