CCXV.

THE JEWS' CEMETERY.

Lido of Venice.

A TRACT of land swept by the salt sea-foam,
Fringed with acacia flowers, and billowy deep
In meadow-grasses, where tall poppies sleep,
And bees athirst for wilding honey roam.
How many a bleeding heart hath found its home
Under these hillocks which the sea-mews sweep!
Here knelt an outcast race to curse and weep,
Age after age, 'neath heaven's unanswering doom.

Sad is the place, and solemn. Grave by grave, Lost in the dunes, with rank weeds overgrown, Pines in abandonment; as though unknown, Uncared for, lay the dead, whose records pave

This path neglected; each forgotten stone Wept by no mourner but the moaning wave.

CCXVI.

A CRUCIFIX IN THE ETSCH THAL.

BLUE mists lie curled along the sullen stream:
Clouds furl the pine-clad highlands whence we came :
Stage after stage, interminably tame,

Stretch the gaunt mountain-flanks without one gleam.
All things are frozen in a dull dead dream:

It is a twilight land without a name :
Each half-awakened hamlet seems the same
Home of grey want and misery supreme.

Heart-breaking is the world-old human strife
With niggard nature traced adown this vale

In records fugitive as human life.

Ah Christ! The land is thine. Those tortured eyes, That thorn-crowned brow, those mute lips, thin and pale,

Appeal from man's pain to the impiteous skies.

CCXVII.

A DREAM OF BURIAL IN MID-OCEAN.

Down through the deep deep grey-green seas, in sleep,
Plunged my drowsed soul; and ever on and on,
Hurrying at first, then where the faint light shone
Through fathoms twelve, with slackening fall did creep:
Nor touched the bottom of that bottomless steep,
But with a slow sustained suspension,
Buoyed 'mid the watery wildernesses wan,
Like a thin cloud in air, voyaged the deep.

Then all those dreadful faces of the sea,
Horned things abhorred and shapes intolerable,
Fixing glazed lidless eyes swam up to me,
And pushed me with their snouts, and coiled and fell
In spiral volumes writhing horribly-

Jagged fins grotesque, fanged ghastly jaws of hell.

CCXVIII.

VENETIAN SUNRISE.

How often have I now outwatched the night
Alone in this grey chamber toward the sea
Turning its deep-arcaded balcony !

Round yonder sharp acanthus-leaves the light
Comes stealing, red at first, then golden bright;
Till when the day-god in his strength and glee
Springs from the orient flood victoriously,
Each cusp is tipped and tongued with quivering white.
The islands that were blots of purple bloom,
Now tremble in soft liquid luminous haze,
Uplifted from the sea-floor to the skies;

And dim discerned erewhile through roseate gloom,
A score of sails now stud the waterways,
Ruffling like swans afloat from paradise.

CCXIX.

MONTENEGRO.

THEY rose to where their sovran eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,

And red with blood the crescent reels from fight Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales. O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne

Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years, Great Tsernogora! never since thine own Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.