L.

We gaze and turn away, and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fulness; there for ever there-
Chain'd to the chariot of triumphal Art,

We stand as captives, and would not depart.
Away!-there need no words, nor terms precise,
The paltry jargon of the marble mart,
Where Pedantry gulls Folly-we have eyes:
Blood-pulse-and breast, confirm the Dardan Shep-
herd's prize.

Appear❜dst thou not to Paris in this guise?
Or to more deeply blest Anchises? or,
In all thy perfect goddess-ship, when lies
Before thee thy own vanquish'd Lord of War?
And gazing in thy face as toward a star,

Laid on thy lap, his eyes to thee upturn,

Feeding on thy sweet cheek! (26) while thy lips are With lava kisses melting while they burn,

Shower'd on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from an

urn!

LII.

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
Of earth recoils upon us ;-let it go!

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,
The artist and his ape, to teach and tell
How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend, and the voluptuous swell:
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.

VOL. II.

I

LIV.

In Santa Croce's holy precincts lie (27)

Ashes which make it holier, dust which is

Even in itself an immortality,

Though there were nothing save the past, and this,
The particle of those sublimities

Which have relapsed to chaos :-here repose
Angelo's, Alfieri's bones, and his, (28)

The starry Galileo, with his woes;

Here Machiavelli's earth, return'd to whence it rose. (29)

LV.

These are four minds, which, like the elements,

Might furnish forth creation :-Italy!

Time, which hath wrong'd thee with ten thousand rents

Of thine imperial garment, shall dený,

And hath denied, to every other sky,
Spirits which soar from ruin :-thy decay
Is still impregnate with divinity,

Which gilds it with revivifying ray;

Such as the great of yore, Canova is to-day.

LVI.

But where 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 Their bones, distinguish'd from our common clay In death as life? Are they resolved to dust, And have their country's marbles nought to say? Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust? Did they not to her breast their filial earth entrust?

LVII.

Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, (30)
Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore; (31)
Thy factions, in their worse than civil war,
Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore
Their children's children would in vain adore
With the remorse of ages; and the crown (32)
Which Petrarch's laureate brow supremely wore,
Upon a far and foreign soil had grown,

His life, his fame, his grave, though rifled-not thine own.

LVIII.

Boccaccio to his parent earth bequeath'd (33) His dust, and lies it not her Great among, With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed O'er him who form'd the Tuscan's siren tongue? That music in itself, whose sounds are song, The poetry of speech? No;-even his tomb Uptorn, must bear the hyæna bigot's wrong, No more amidst the meaner dead find room, Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for whom!

LIX.

And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust; Yet for this want more noted, as of yore The Cæsar's pageant, shorn of Brutus' bust, Did but of Rome's best Son remind her more: Happier Ravenna! on thy hoary shore, Fortress of falling empire! honour'd sleeps The immortal exile;-Arqua, too, her store Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps, While Florence vainly begs her banish'd dead and weeps.