XLVII. Yet, Italy! through every other land Thy wrongs should ring, and shall, from side to side; Was then our guardian, and is still our guide; Nations have knelt to for the keys of heaven! Shall yet redeem thee, and, all backward driven, XLVIII. But Arno wins us to the fair white walls, Her corn, and wine, and oil, and Plenty leaps XLIX. There, too, the Goddess loves in stone, and fills The air around with beauty; we inhale The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils Of heaven is half undrawn; within the pale We stand, and in that form and face behold What Mind can make, when Nature's self would fail; And to the fond idolaters of old Envy the innate flash which such a soul could mould: We L. gaze and turn away, and know not where, Where Pedantry gulls Folly-we have eyes: prize. LI. Appear'dst thou not to Paris in this guise? Shower'd on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from an urn! LIL Glowing, and circumfused in speechless love, Their full divinity inadequate That feeling to express, or to improve, The gods become as mortals, and man's fate Has moments like their brightest; but the weight We can recal such visions, and create, From what has been, or might be, things which grow Into thy statue's form, and look like gods below. LIII. I leave to learned fingers and wise hands, Let these describe the undescribable : I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream Wherein that image shall for ever dwell; The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam. LIV. In Santa Croce's holy precincts lie Ashes which make it holier, dust which is Even in itself an immortality, Though there were nothing save the past, and this, Which have relapsed to chaos :-here repose Angelo's, Alfieri's bones, and his, The starry Galileo, with his woes; Here Machiavelli's earth return'd to whence it rose. LV. These are four minds, which, like the elements, Might furnish forth creation:-Italy! Time, which hath wrong'd thee with ten thousand rents And hath denied, to every other sky, But where LVI. repose the all Etruscan threeDante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they, The Bard of Prose, creative spirit! he Of the Hundred Tales of love-where did they lay LVII. Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, With the remorse of ages; and the crown His life, his fame, his grave, though rifled-not thine own. |