While sea-born gales their gelid wings expand To winnow fragrance round the smiling land.

But small the bliss that sense alone bestows,
And sensual bliss is all the nation knows.
In florid beauty groves and fields appear,
Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.
Contrasted faults through all his manners reign;
Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain;
Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue;
And e'en in penance planning sins anew.
All evils here contaminate the mind,
That opulence departed leaves behind;
For wealth was theirs; not far removed the date
When commerce proudly flourished through the
state;

At her command the palace learnt to rise,
Again the long-fallen column sought the skies;
The canvas glowed beyond e'en Nature warm,
The pregnant quarry teemed with human form.
Till, more unsteady than the southern gale,
Commerce on other shores displayed her sail;
While naught remained of all that riches gave,
But towns unmanned, and lords without a slave:
And late the nation found with fruitless skill
Its former strength was but plethoric ill.

Yet still the loss of wealth is here supplied
By arts, the splendid wrecks of former pride;
From these the feeble heart and long-fallen mind
An easy compensation seem to find.
Here may be seen, in bloodless pomp arrayed,
The pasteboard triumph and the cavalcade;
Processions formed for piety and love,
A mistress or a saint in every grove.

By sports like these are all their cares beguiled,
The sports of children satisfy the child;
Each nobler aim, represt by long control,
Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul;
While low delights succeeding fast behind,
In happier meanness occupy the mind;
As in those domes where Cæsars once bore sway,
Defaced by time and tottering in decay,
There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed,
And, wondering man could want the larger pile,
Exults, and owns his cottage with a smile.

My soul, turn from them, turn we to survey, Where rougher climes a nobler race display, Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansion

tread,

And force a churlish soil for scanty bread;
No product here the barren hills afford,
But man and steel, the soldier and his sword.
No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast,
But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.
Yet still, e'en here, content can spread a charm,
Redress the clime, and all its rage disarm,

Though poor the peasant's hut, his feasts though small,

He sees his little lot the lot of all;
Sees no contiguous palace rear its head
To shame the meanness of his humble shed,
No costly lord the sumptuous banquet deal
To make him loathe his vegetable meal;
But calm, and bred in ignorance and toil,
Each wish contracting, fits him to the soil.
Cheerful at morn, he wakes from short repose,
Breathes the keen air, and carols as he goes;
With patient angle trolls the finny deep,
Or drives his venturous ploughshare to the steep;
Or seeks the den where snow-tracks mark the way,
And drags the struggling savage into day.
At night returning, every labor sped,
He sits him down the monarch of a shed:
Smiles by his cheerful fire, and round surveys
His children's looks, that brighten at the blaze;
While his loved partner, boastful of her hoard,
Displays her cleanly platter on the board;
And haply too some pilgrim, thither led,
With many a tale repays the nightly bed.

ITALY.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

O ITALY, how beautiful thou art!

Yet I could weep, for thou art lying, alas!
Low in the dust; and they who come admire thee
As we admire the beautiful in death.
Thine was a dangerous gift, the gift of beauty.
Would thou hadst less, or wert as once thou wast,
Inspiring awe in those who now enslave thee!
But why despair? Twice hast thou lived already,
Twice shone among the nations of the world,
As the sun shines among the lesser lights
Of heaven; and shalt again. The hour shall come,
When they who think to bind the ethereal spirit,
Who, like the eagle cowering o'er his prey,
Watch with quick eye, and strike and strike again
If but a sinew vibrate, shall confess
Their wisdom folly.

VENICE.

SAMUEL ROGERS.

THERE is a glorious City in the Sea. The Sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, Ebbing and flowing; and the salt sea-weed Clings to the marble of her palaces. No track of men, no footsteps to and fro, Lead to her gates. The path lies o'er the Sea, Invisible; and from the land we went, As to a floating City, -steering in, And gliding up her streets as in a dream,

So smoothly, silently, - by many a dome
Mosque-like, and many a stately portico,
The statues ranged along an azure sky;

By many a pile in more than Eastern splendor,
Of old the residence of merchant kings;

The fronts of some, though Time had shattered them,

Still glowing with the richest hues of art,

ROME.

A few in fear,

Flying away from him whose boast it was
That the grass grew not where his horse had trod,
Gave birth to Venice. Like the water-fowl,
They built their nests among the ocean waves;
And where the sands were shifting, as the wind
Blew from the north, the south; where they that

came,

Had to make sure the ground they stood upon,
Rose, like an exhalation, from the deep,
A vast Metropolis, with glittering spires,
With theatres, basilicas adorned;
A scene of light and glory, a dominion,
That has endured the longest among men.

And whence the talisman by which she rose Towering? 'T was found there in the barren sea. Want led to Enterprise; and, far or near, Who met not the Venetian? - now in Cairo ; Ere yet the Califa came, listening to hear Its bells approaching from the Red Sea coast; Now on the Euxine, on the Sea of Azoph, In converse with the Persian, with the Russ, The Tartar; on his lowly deck receiving Pearls from the gulf of Ormus, gems from Bagdad, Eyes brighter yet, that shed the light of love From Georgia, from Circassia. Wandering round, When in the rich bazaar he saw, displayed, Treasures from unknown climes, away he went, And, travelling slowly upward, drew erelong From the well-head supplying all below; Making the Imperial City of the East Herself his tributary.

Thus did Venice rise,

Thus flourish, till the unwelcome tidings came,
That in the Tagus had arrived a fleet
From India, from the region of the Sun,
Fragrant with spices, that a way was found,
A channel opened, and the golden stream
Turned to enrich another. Then she felt
Her strength departing, and at last she fell,
Fell in an instant, blotted out and razed;
She who had stood yet longer than the longest
Of the Four Kingdoms, who, as in an Ark,
Had floated down amid a thousand wrecks,
Uninjured, from the Old World to the New.

SAMURL ROGERS.

And I spring up as girt to run a race!

Thou art in Rome! the City that so long Reigned absolute, the mistress of the world; The mighty vision that the prophets saw, And trembled; that from nothing, from the least, The lowliest village (what but here and there A reed-roofed cabin by a river-side ? ) Grew into everything; and, year by year, Patiently, fearlessly working her way O'er brook and field, o'er continent and sea, Not like the merchant with his merchandise, Or traveller with staff and scrip exploring, But hand to hand and foot to foot through hosts, Through nations numberless in battle array, Each behind each, each, when the other fell, Up and in arms, at length subdued them all.

I linger yet with Nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness

I learned the language of another world.
I do remember me, that in my youth,
When I was wandering,

upon such a night I stood within the Coliseum's wall, Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome. The trees which grew along the broken arches Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar The watch-dog bayed beyond the Tiber; and More near from out the Cæsars' palace came The owl's long cry, and, interruptedly, Of distant sentinels the fitful song Begun and died upon the gentle wind. Some cypresses beyond the time-worn breach Appeared to skirt the horizon, yet they stood Within a bowshot, where the Cæsars dwelt, And dwell the tuneless birds of night, amidst A grove which springs through levelled battlements,

Floats o'er this vast and wondrous monument, And shadows forth its glory. There is given Unto the things of earth, which Time hath bent, A spirit's feeling, and where he hath leant His hand, but broke his scythe, there is a power And magic in the ruined battlement, For which the palace of the present hour Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower. And here the buzz of eager nations ran, In murmured pity, or loud-roared applause, As man was slaughtered by his fellow-man. And wherefore slaughtered? wherefore, but because

534

We look on the dreamy Campagna,
All glowing with setting day, -

All melting in bands of purple,
In swathings and foldings of gold,
In ribbons of azure and lilac,

Like a princely banner unrolled.

And the smoke of each distant cottage,
And the flash of each villa white,
Shines out with an opal glimmer,
Like gems in a casket of light.
And the dome of old St. Peter's

With a strange translucence glows,
Like a mighty bubble of amethyst
Floating in waves of rose.

In a trance of dreamy vagueness,
We, gazing and yearning, behold
That city beheld by the prophet,
Whose walls were transparent gold.

And, dropping all solemn and slowly,
To hallow the softening spell,
There falls on the dying twilight
The Ave Maria bell.

With a mournful, motherly softness,
With a weird and weary care,
That strange and ancient city

Seems calling the nations to prayer.
And the words that of old the angel
To the mother of Jesus brought
Rise like a new evangel,

To hallow the trance of our thought. With the smoke of the evening incense Our thoughts are ascending, then,

To Mary, the mother of Jesus,

To Jesus, the Master of men.

O city of prophets and martyrs !

O shrines of the sainted dead!
When, when shall the living day-spring
Once more on your towers be spread?

When He who is meek and lowly

Shall rule in those lordly halls,
And shall stand and feed as a shepherd
The flock which his mercy calls, -

O, then to those noble churches,

To picture and statue and gem,
To the pageant of solemn worship,
Shall the meaning come back again.
And this strange and ancient city,

In that reign of his truth and love,
Shall be what it seems in the twilight,
The type of that City above.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

While night, o'er tomb and shrine, Rests darkly clear.

Many a solemn hymn,

By starlight sung,
Sweeps through the arches dim,
Thy wrecks among.

Many a flute's low swell

On thy soft air

Lingers, and loves to dwell
With summer there.

Thou hast the south's rich gift
Of sudden song,

A charméd fountain, swift,
Joyous, and strong.

Thou hast fair forms that move
With queenly tread ;
Thou hast proud fanes above
Thy mighty dead.

Yet wears thy Tiber's shore
A mournful mien :-
Rome, Rome! thou art no more
As thou hast been !

FELICIA HEMANS