Selected Poems (104 page)

1345

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

1350

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

1355

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

1360

Turn to the Mole which Hadrian rear’d on high,

Imperial mimic of old Egypt’s piles,

Colossal copyist of deformity,

Whose travell’d phantasy from the far Nile’s

Enormous model, doom’d the artist’s toils

1365

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,

1370

To which Diana’s marvel was a cell –

Christ’s mighty shrine above his martyr’s tomb!

I have beheld the Ephesian’s miracle –

Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell

The hyæna and the jackall in their shade;

1375

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 –

1380

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,

1385

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,

1390

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

1395

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 harmonise —

1400

All 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

1405

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 eve — so here condense thy soul

To more immediate objects, and control

1410

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

1415

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

1420

Defies at 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

1425

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 plan;

The fountain of sublimity displays

1430

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 pain –

A father’s love and mortal’s agony

1435

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

1440

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 light –

The Sun in human limbs array’d, and brow

All radiant from his triumph in the fight;

1445

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

1450

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

1455

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!

CLXIII

And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven

1460

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;

1465

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?

1470

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

1475

With forms which live and suffer – let that pass –

His shadow fades away into Destruction’s mass,

CLXV

Which gathers shadow, substance, life, and all

That we inherit in its mortal shroud,

And spreads the dim and universal pall

1480

Through which all things grow phantoms; and the cloud

Between us sinks and all which ever glow’d,

Till Glory’s self is twilight, and displays

A melancholy halo scarce allow’d

To hover on the verge of darkness; rays

1485

Sadder than saddest night, for they distract the gaze,

CLXVI

And send us prying into the abyss,

To gather what we shall be when the frame

Shall be resolved to something less than this

Its wretched essence; and to dream of fame,

1490

And wipe the dust from off the idle name

We never more shall hear, – but never more,

Oh, happier thought! can we be made the same:

It is enough in sooth that
once
we bore