SI DESCENDERO IN INFERNUM, ADES. O, WANDERING dim on the extremest edge That shivers o'er the dead pool stiff and dry, Still by cracked arch and broken shaft I trace A child's play-altar reared of stones and moss, With wilted flowers for offering laid across, Mute recognition of the all-ruling Grace. How far are ye from the innocent, from those snows, Or in the summer blithe with lamb-cropped green, Save the one track, where naught more rude is seen Than the plump wain at even Bringing home four months' sunshine bound in sheaves ! How far are ye from those! yet who believes Your souls partake its influence, not in vain Looking within myself, I note how thin A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate, Where ye grope darkly,-ye who never knew Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled ; Ah, side by side with heart's-ease in this world The fatal nightshade grows and bitter rue! One band ye cannot break,—the force that clips The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes; By bigot feet polluted ; Yet they who watch your God-compelled return May see your happy perihelion burn Where the calm sun his unfledged planets broods. TO THE PAST. WONDROUS and awful are thy silent halls, There all is hushed and breathless, There sits drear Egypt, 'mid beleaguering sands, Half woman and half beast, The burnt-out torch within her mouldering hands That once lit all the East; A dotard bleared and hoary, There Asser crouches o'er the blackened brands Still as a city buried 'neath the sea, Titanic shapes with faces blank and dun, Gaze on the embers of the sunken sun, And yet the eternal sorrow In their unmonarched eyes says day is done O realm of silence and of swart eclipse, Make signs to us and move their withered lips Yet all their sound and motion Bring no more freight to us than wraiths of ships And if sometimes a moaning wandereth If some grim shadow of thy living death And scares the world to error, The eternal life sends forth melodious breath Thy mighty clamors, wars, and world-noised deeds Gone like a tremble of the huddling reeds Thy forms and creeds have vanished, Whatever of true life there was in thee Wield still thy bent and wrinkled empery, To thee thy dross is clinging, For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see, Here, 'mid the bleak waves of our strife and care, |