Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts! Despoil'd yet perfect, with thy circle spreads A holiness appealing to all hearts- To art a model; and to him who treads Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds
Her light through thy sole aperture; to those Who worship, here are altars for their beads; And they who feel for genius may repose
Their eyes on honour'd forms, whose busts around them close.77
There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light 78 What do I gaze on? Nothing: Look again! Two forms are slowly shadow'd on my sight- Two insulated phantoms of the brain : It is not so; I see them full and plain- An old man, and a female young and fair, Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose vein
The blood is nectar :-but what doth she there, With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?
Full swells the deep pure fountain of young life, Where on the heart and from the heart we took Our first and sweetest nurture, when the wife, Blest into mother, in the innocent look,
Or even the piping cry of lips that brook No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook
She sees her little bud put forth its leaves
What may the fruit be yet? I know not-Cain was
But here youth offers to old age the food, The milk of his own gift: it is her sire
To whom she renders back the debt of blood Born with her birth. No; he shall not expire While in those warm and lovely veins the fire Of health and holy feeling can provide
Great Nature's Nile, whose deep stream rises higher Than Egypt's river: from that gentle side
Drink, drink and live, old man! Heaven's realm holds no such tide.
The starry fable of the milky way Has not thy story's purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more in this Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds :-Oh, holiest nurse! No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss To thy sire's heart, replenishing its source With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.
Turn to the mole which Hadrian rear'd on high,79 Imperial mimic of old Egypt's piles,
Colossal copyist of deformity,
Whose travell'd phantasy from the far Nile's
Enormous model, doom'd the artist's toils
To build for giants, and for his vain earth,
His shrunken ashes, raise this dome: How smiles
The gazer's eye with philosophic mirth,
To view the huge design which sprung from such a
But lo! the dome-the vast and wondrous dome, To which Diana's marvel was a cell- Christ's mighty shrine above his martyr's tomb! I have beheld the Ephesian's miracle ;—
Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell The hyæna and the jackal in their shade;
I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell
Their glittering mass i' the sun, and have survey'd Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem pray'd;
But thou, of temples old, or altars new, Standest alone, with nothing like to thee- Worthiest of God, the holy and the true. Since Zion's desolation, when that He Forsook his former city, what could be, Of earthly structures, in his honour piled,
Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty,
Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty all are aisled
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled.
Enter its grandeur overwhelms thee not; And why it is not lessen'd; but thy mind, Expanded by the genius of the spot, Has grown colossal, and can only find A fit abode wherein appear enshrined Thy hopes of immortality; and thou Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, See thy God face to face, as thou dost now His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.
A nt abode wherein appear enshrined Thy hopes of immortality; and thou Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, See thy God face to face, as thou dost now His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.
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