CXLV.

"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;65) "When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; "And when Rome falls-the World. From our own land

Thus spake the pilgrims o'er this mighty wall In Saxon times, which we are wont to call Ancient; and these three mortal things are still On their foundatious, and unalter'd all;

Rome and her Rnin past Redemption's skill, The World, the same wide den of thieves, or what ye will.

CXLVI.

Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublimeShrine of all saints and temple of all gods, From Jove to Jesus-spared and blest by time; 6) Looking tranquillity, while falls or nods

Arch, empire, each thing round thee,and man plods His way through thorus to ashes-glorious dome! Shalt thou not last? Time's scythe and tyrant's rods Shiver upon thee-sanctuary and home Of art and piety-Pantheon! pride of Rome!

CXLVII.

Relic of nobler days, and noblest arts! Despoil'd yet perfect, with thy circle spreads A holiness appealing to all hearts

To art a model; and to him who treads Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds Her light through thy sole aperture; to those Who worship, here are altars for their beads; And they who feel for genius may repose Their eyes on honour'd forms, whose basts around them close. 64)

CXLVIII.

There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light 6)
What do I gaze on? Nothing: Look again!
Two forms are slowly shadow'd on my sight-
Two insulated phantoms of the brain:
It is not so; I see them full and plain
An old man, and a female young and fair,
Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose vein

The blood is nectar: but what doth she there, With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?

CXLIX.

Full swells the deep pure fountain of young life, Where on the heart and from the heart we took Our first and sweetest nurture, when the wife Blest into mother, in the innocent look, Or even the piping cry of lips that brook No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives Man knows not, when from out its cradled nook She sees her little bud put forth its leavesWhat may the fruit be yet? I know not - Cain was Eve's.

CL.

But here youth offers to old age the food,
The milk of his own gift: - it is her sire
To whom she renders back the debt of blood
Born with her birth. No; he shall not expire
While in those warm and lovely veins the fire
Of health and holy feeling can provide

Great Nature's Nile, whose deep stream rises higher Than Egypt's river:- from that gentle side Drink, drink and live, old man! Heaven's realm holds no such tide.

CLI.

The starry fable of the milky way
Has not thy story's purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds: Oh, holiest

nurse!

No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss To thy sire's heart, replenishing its source With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.

CLII.

Turn to the Mole which Hadrian rear'd on high, 67)
Imperial mimic of old Egypt's piles,
Colossal copyist of deformity,

Whose travell'd phantasy from the far Nile's
Enormons model, doom'd the artist's toils
To build for giants, and for his vain earth
His shrunken ashes raise this dome: How smiles
The gazer's eye with philosophic mirth,
To view the huge design which sprung from such
a birth!

CLIII.

But lo! the dome-the vast and wondrous dome, 68) To which Diana's marvel was a cell

Christ's mighty shrine above his martyr's tomb! I have beheld the Ephesian's miracleIts columns strew the wilderness, and dwell The hyaena and the jackail in their shade; I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell Their glittering mass i' the sun, and have survey'd Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem pray'd;

CLIV.

But thou, of temples old, or altars new,
Standest alone-with nothing like to thee-
Worthiest of God, the holy and the true.
Since Zion's desolation, when that He
Forsook his former city, what could be,
Of earthly structures, in his honour piled,
Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty,

Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty, all are aisled In this eternal ark of worship undefiled.

CLV.

Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not; And why? it is not lessen'd; but thy mind, Expanded by the genius of the spot, Has grown colossal, and can only find A fit abode wherein appear enshrined Thy hopes of immortality; and thou Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, See thy God face to face, as thou dost now His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.

CLVI.

Thou movest-but increasing with the advance, Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise,

Deceived by its gigantic elegance;

Vastness which grows-but grows to harmonizeAll musical in its immensities;

Rich_marbles-richer painting-shrines where flame

The lamps of gold-and haughty dome which vies In air with Earth's chief structures, though their frame

Sits on the firm-set ground-and this the clouds must claim.

CLVII.

Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break,
To separate contemplation, the great whole;
And as the ocean many bays will make,

That ask the eye-so here condense thy soul
To more immediate objects, and control
Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart
Its eloquent proportions, and unroll

In mighty graduations, part by part,

The glory which at once upon thee did not dart,

CLVIII.

Not by its fault-but thine: Our outward sense
Is but of gradual grasp and as it is
That what we have of feeling most intense
Outstrips our faint expression; even so this
Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice

Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great
Defies as first our Nature's littleness,

Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.

CLIX.

Then pause,
and be enlighten'd; there is more
In such a survey than the sating gaze
Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore
The worship of the place, or the mere praise
Of art and its great masters, who could raise
What former time, nor skill, nor thought could
plain;

The fountain of sublimity displays

Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of man Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions

can.

CLX.

Or, turning to the Vatican, go see Laocoon's torture dignifying painA father's love and mortal's agony With an immortal's patience blending: Vain The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp, The old man's clench; the long envenom'd chain Rivets the living links, the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.

-

CLXI.

Or view the Lord of the unerring bow, The God of life, and poesy, and lightThe Sun in hunian limbs array'd. and brow All radiant from his triumph in the fight; The shaft hath just been shot-the arrow bright With an immortal's vengeance; in his eye And nostril beautiful disdain, and might, And majesty, flash their full lightnings by, Developing in, that one glance the Deity.

CLXII.

But in his delicate form-a dream of Love,
Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast
Long'd for a deathless lover from above,
And madden'd in that vision - are exprest
All that ideal beauty ever bless'd

The mind with in its most unearthly mood,
When each conception was a heavenly guest-
A ray of immortality and stood,

Starlike, around, until they gather'd to a god!

And if it be Promethens stole from Heaven The fire which we endure, it was repaid By him to whom the energy was given Which this poetic marble hath array'd With an eternal glory which, if made By human hands, is not of human thought; And Time himself hath hallow'd it, nor laid One ringlet in the dust-nor hath it caught A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought.

CLXIV.

But where is he, the Pilgrim of my song, The being who upheld it through the past? Methinks he cometh late and tarries long. He is no more these breathings are his last; His wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast, And he himself as nothing:- if he was Aught but a phantasy, and could be class'd With forms which life and suffer- let that passHis shadow fades away into Destruction's mass,