Fairfield, Sumner Lincoln, 1803-1844 [1832], The last night of Pompeii: a poem (, New York) [word count] [eaf090].
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THE LAST NIGHT OF POMPEII. CANTO I.
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Mid mellow folds of softly floating gold,
The flowered pavilions of the spirit winds,
That waved in music to the Ausonian breeze,
And blent, like heart-smiles, with the deep blue vault
Of beautiful Campania, like a God,
(Titan in ancient dreams, whose faintest smile
Elysian splendors breathed through ocean's realm,)
Casting aside earth's throbbing dust, to put
His diadem of deathless glory on,
The sun went slowly down the Appenines.
Far up the living dome of heaven, the clouds,
Pearling the azure, like a seraph's robe,
Wreathed o'er the blessed and beaming face of heaven,
And glanced, mid blush and shadow, o'er the sky,
Full of the gentle spirit of the air,
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The mediator of the elements.
As if imbued with virgin thought, the leaves
Tenderly smiled their loveliness, and sighed,
O'er the hushed summer earth, their music, soft
As the sky-hymns o'er wandering souls forgiven.
The hills cast giant shadows, in whose depth
Wild jagged rocks, and solitary floods,
And forests gnarled and hoar, looking deep awe,
Like the vast deserts of a dream, replied
To voices of unresting phantoms, there
Till day-dreams, wrapt in dark sublimities.
On the fair shores and sea-worn promontories,
Where many a Doric palace, proudly built,
And overwhelmed by grandeur, silent stood,
Save when the twilight waters whispered low
Their vigil anthem, childlike slumbered now,
In speechless beauty, the last light; afar,
The avalanche in the ravine glimmered back
The trembling and most transitory glow;
The beaked and burnished galleys on the wave
With quivering banners hung, and gay triremes
Passed by each isle and headland like the shade
Of Enna's idol through the realm of Dis.
All nature, in her holy hour of love,
Lifted in rapture the heart's vesper prayer.
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And thus from Pompeii's Field of Tombs the voice
Of Vesta's priestess, o'er the sepulchres
Bending beneath the holy Heaven, sent up
The anguish of bereavement, and the doubts
Of an immortal mind that knew not yet
Its immortality, yet seeking e'er
A deathless hope and sighing o'er the pomp
Profane of paynim adoration vain.
Zephyr of twilight! thine elysian breath
In spirit music steals through orange groves:
Bringst thou no memories from the home of death?
No whispered yearnings from departed loves?
Fann'd not thy wing, ere stars above thee glowed,
The pure pale brow that on my birth-hour smiled?
And bearst thou not from Destiny's abode
One kiss from mother to her vestal child?
Cold sleep the ashes of the heart that breathed
But for my bliss—when being's suns were few;
And hath the spirit no high hope bequeathed?
Or must it drink the grave's eternal dew?
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Hesper! the beauty of thy virgin light
Blossoms along the blue of yon sweet sky—
Yet vain my heart soars—from the deep of night
No voice or vision thrills my ear or eye.
From Vesta's vigil shrine no light ascends
Beyond this realm of sin, doubt, grief, and death;
Reveals no heaven where meet immortal friends,
Shadows no being victor over breath!
Sunlight and fragrance, dewbeam and still eve
Shed not their bliss and beauty on thine urn!
Has earth no hope time never can bereave?
No power again to bid the pale dust burn?
The rippling rills, the radiant morns, the flowers,
Bursting in beauty, showers of iris hues,
Starlight and love—the graces and the hours—
Each—all must vanish like the dial dews!
Budding to wither—lingering to impart
Life's hopeless pangs when thought shall sink in gloom—
Can song or mythos soothe the shuddering heart?
Or e'en the Thunderer's eye illume the tomb?
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Now from the mountain tent mid ilex woods
Or gay pavilions in the elysian vale,
Wandered, on twilight air, through clustering vines,
The cithern's music and the lute's soft strain
Echoed the soul of love-filled melody.
The hills seemed living with delight, for there
As Summer's burning solstice felt the breath
Of Autumn floating o'er its fires, retired,
From cities thronged with death, the wise and gay,
In fellowship or loneliness, to seek
Felicity or wisdom from the woods;
And there the dreams of Arcady—the thought,
That, in the elder days, inspired the soul
Of Phantasie and breathed through Nature's smiles
Elysian revelations, clothing earth
In mornstar robes of loveliness, became
The blest companions of the pure in heart.
The rose and purple radiance from the sky
Fled like Love's visions or the arrow's plume,
O'er the dim isles and sea of Italy,
Mid the dark foliage mingling like the hopes
Of earth with night-fears, when the shadows, cast
From thought, with high and pure revealments blend
Of beautiful existence far beyond
The mockery and the madness of this life.
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In shadowy grandeur lay the glorious sea,
Whose waters wafted spoils from orient realms,
And mirrored Nature's beauty, while dread war
Bathed Punic banners in the gore of Rome.
The evening isles of love and loveliness
Slept in the soothing solitude, wherein
The awful intellect of Rome sought peace
In grey philosophy while faction poured
Its hydra venom, or conspiracy
Walked the thronged Forum, dooming, at a glance,
The loftiest to extinction; here the bard
Unfolded earth's and heaven's mysteries,
Creating the world's creed and Fiction's brow
Wreathing with the immortal buds of truth.
Among the sanctities of groves and streams,
The worn and wearied bosom breathed again
Its birthlight bliss, and wisdom, born of woe,
Uttered its oracles to coming years;
And in the midst of all that thrills and charms,
Weds beauty unto grandeur, earth to heaven,
Here tyrant crime achieved, by nameless deeds,
The world's redemption from remorseless guilt.
Bland airs flew o'er the faded heavens, and streams,
That in the noonday dazzled, and e'en now
Drank the rich hues of eventide, purled on
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With lovelier music, and the green still shores
Looked up to the blue mountains with the face—
The cherub face of sinless infancy—
With hope and joy perpetual in that look;
For, mid all changes, still the faded bloom
Shall be renewed—the slumbering heart revived.
And then the crescent streamed o'er air-winged clouds
With an ethereal lustre, and the stars,
The dread sabaoth of the unbounded air,
From the profound between each downy fold,
Gleamed like the eyes of seraphs, from the realms
Of immortality beholding earth.
Beneath the dying glories of the day,
And the unspeakable beauty of the night,
Yet in the haunt of peril—the dim home
Of dread and danger—looking o'er the domes
Of destined Pompeii—stood two shadowy Forms,
Pale, yet unfaltering—famished, yet in soul,
Fed from the altar of their risen God.
One—a tried warrior by his eye and brow
And dauntless port, leaned on the shattered ledge
Of a Vesuvian cavern, o'er which trailed
The matted and dark vines, and thickly hung
The cypress and dwarfed cedar, fleckering o'er
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The twilight of the vestibule with gloom,
And shutting from the inner vault, where slept
The banned and hunted Nazarenes, all beams
Of sunset, mornlight, and meridian, save
Light from the living fount of Deity.
Beside him, folding in Love's holiness
His wasted bosom, on his troubled brow,
Pouring the radiance of her dark eyes, stood
A Hebrew captive, dragged amid the spoils
And splendors of Moriah, when the hour
Of Desolation fell on Zion's towers,
To swell the victor's wild array and add
Another cup of vengeance and despair
To imperial, merciless, world-wasting Rome.
There Mariamne clung to Pansa's breast.
The melancholy loveliness of Love,
That dares the voiceless desert and inspires
The forest solitude, around her hung
Like star-gemmed clouds around an angel's form;
On her pale brow the very soul of faith
Rested as by its shrine; and earth's vain pride
And triumph from the vaulted refuge fled
Where Hope breathed Love's own immortality.
Like her, the sun-clothed vision, in whose crown
Gleamed the twelve orbs of glory as she stood
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Amid the floating moon's young shadowy light,
When the red sceptered Dragon cast from heaven
The blossomed beams of the universe, and watched
His spoil in breathless rapture; so, mid grief
And want and loneliness and danger stood
The daughter of the east, in every woe
Fearless, in every peril quick in thought
And action, whether dread calamity
Waited the wanderings of her wedded love,
Or through the clouds of fear upon her came.
Thoughts, winnowed from the gross and grovelling dust
Of earth, and glistering with the hues of heaven,
Passed o'er their mingled spirits in the depth
Of the hoar Appenines; (1) and thus the heart
Of the changed Roman spake, whose home had been
The tented battlefield, whose joy, the spoil
Of nations gasping 'neath the banner folds
Of conquest, ere amid the flames and shrieks
Of Solyma, he heard the Voice that fills
Infinity, with immeasurable awe,
And worshipped mid the scorn of pagan hands.
Relentless as the edict he obeyed,
His dauntless soul, in other years, had roamed
Through carnage, and, in triumph, mocked the moans
Of fallen mortality, as his fellows did,
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The legions of the loveless; but the faith,
Whose founder wept o'er doomed and ruthless foes,
Sunk on his bosom as the sunset sinks
Upon the wild and savage mountain peak,
Clothing its barrenness with beauty!—Thus
His saddened but serene mind communed now.
“Oh, the still, sacred, soothing light that bathes
The blue, world-studded heavens—while the breath
Of Antumn gushes music, and inspires
The purified and thrilled spirit with the power
To cast aside the thrall of flesh and soar
To converse with the seraphim and prayer
And sacrifice beneath the throne of God!
The madness and the misery, that rend
The heart no skill can renovate, come not
Within the bosom's temple that imbibes
The oracles of Truth in every breeze.
Thou needest not thy tephilim (2) to lift
Thy thoughts within the veil, nor seek I more
The prestiges of augurs to impart
The destined future, nor vain amulets
To guard what He, who gave, can well preserve.
Look, Mariamne! on the dimpled sea,
That slumbers like the jasper waters seen
In the apocalypse of Patmos, hang
The crowding sails of merchant barks delayed,
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The altars at their prows casting pale gleams,
While by the dagon deities of earth,
The terrible apotheoses, wrought
From desolating passions, vainly now
The mariners invoke the gale to bear
Their treasures to the imperial mart—and lo!
The living leaves stir not the gemdew, wept
By twilight o'er the forest, in reply.”
Rapt by the charm and majesty—the bloom
And dreamy verdure of the world and skies—
Yet looking far beyond them, thus replied
The High Priest's banished child unto the thought
Of the baptized and scorned Decurion.
“Methinks, my Pansa!—as we gaze around—
The shadows of the hoar and giant woods,
The sea's unearthly and hushed gleam, the eyes
Of the unlimited and soul-peopled heaven,
Thus calm and awful, and the silence, throned
Amid the universe, sink on my soul
With an unwonted dread, and throng my brain
Like breathless ministers of doom. Among
The woven cedar-boughs and oak canopies,
The pale green moss, thick shrubs and mazy vines
Of these dark rocks, a spirit seems to fill
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The air with revelations none can hear,
Save they who, fearing God, fear not vain man.
Like the mysterious and unvoiced Name,
Upon the white gem written, which none beheld
But the anointed, fearful characters
Seem to my startled vision forming now
Among you dense and thought-winged thunder-clouds.
Whose dusky peaks ascend above the hills;
And, see! with what a brow of majesty
Vesuvius, through the bland transparent air,
And vivid moonlight, o'er our vigil bends!
Dwells there not terror in earth's breathlessness?
And peril in the slumber of the mount?”
Sadly the Roman turned his gaze below
Upon the fated city, gleaming now
With countless lights o'er pageantries and feasts,
That flared in mockery of the hallowed heaven,
Then answered mournfully his dreading bride.
“The happy deem not so—discern not ought
Beyond their splendor, fame and luxury;
For, knowing not the evil, which, as clouds
Impart a lovelier glory to the skies,
(Else dim with sultriness) invests all good
With loftier attributes; they cannot fear
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The forfeiture of wealth, or any change
To adverse fortune; mark the gorgeous pomp,
The maskings, orgies, agonalia now
In mirth and madness echoing o'er our watch
From Pompeii's lava streets; her sculptured domes
Flash back the torchlights of the riot throng,
And countless chariots, rivalling their God
Of Morn, are hurled along the trembling side
Of this most awful mount, as if the fire
Had never wreathed to heaven and poured the heart
Of earth in blood-red torrents! By yon gate,
Towers the proud temple of the idol first
Made and adored by earth's first Rebel—him
Called Nimrod, and exalted to a God
By the debased and impious sons of Ham.—
There Parian columns and Mosaic floors
And golden shrines and lavers, and proud forms
Wrought by Praxiteles with godlike skill,
And pictures glowing with unshadowed charms
To tempt, or mythologic pomp to awe
The enthusiast and the sceptic, can attest
Idolatry's magnificence. Within,
The secret stair—the victim, whose wild shrieks
Are oracles—the flamen at his wine
Or darker deeds of sacrilege, while throngs
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Of blind adorers, manacled without
By fear's inflicted madness, bend in awe
And pile first fruits and gold around her shrine—
These are the illusions and the destinies
Of Isis and her earthborn vassals, love!
Think they of aspects men believe they rule?
Think they of perils in their revelry?
Know they the God whose least respected works
They mock, as deities, by all excess
Loathsome and nameless to the human ear?”
“The destined hour of justice and despair,
When they shall gather wisdom, flings its shade
Upon the dial of the conqueror's doom.”
Thought hurried fast through Mariamne's soul.
“Said not the Christ from the bright Olive Mount,
Looking in sorrow on the temple clothed
With peerless glory, that the Holy Place
Should be defiled—the city trampled—all
Its princely dwellers captive, slain, or strewn
Like sear leaves o'er the unreceiving world,
Or scorned for uttering creeds the torture taught?
And not one stone upon another left
To mark where once the sanctuary stood?
Alas! she sleeps in desolation's arms,
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The city of my childhood, and not one
Of all the pleasant haunts, the palmgrove plain
Of Sharon and Siloam's holy fount,
And Lebanon's pavilioned wood—which thought,
At morn or even twilight, sanctified,
Looks from the ruins of my home! but thou,
My Pansa! art my home and temple now,
And the Atoner, whom my people slew,
The God of this wrecked heart—wrecked when it felt
Its father slain, its race to bondage sold
Beneath the patriarch's Terebinth! alas!
That bigot faction—pride unquenched by woe—
And thanklessness and treachery and wrath,
Perpetuated by all punishment,
And, more than either, the one awful crime
That ne'er shall be forgiven, till the faith—
They mocked and shall mock, ages hence, the same
Without a country, law, chief, priest and home
They were, in glory, with them all—shall fill
Their dark and desolated minds with light—
That these led on the Roman to the spoil
And allied with his bands to our despair!
—But I do grieve thee, love! by selfish plaint,
And shut my soul to knowledge of the rites
And ministrations of thy monarch race.
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Power and impunity with them, as all,
Forestall, I dread, their death-doom; yet again
As we behold Campania's loveliest realm
Unfolded far beneath us, let me learn
The polity and faith of Italy.
Yon vast pile, in the centre, looking o'er
The Appian with a mild magnificence”—?
“'Twas once, ere Freedom perished, and the car
Of conquest bore the tyrant to his throne,
The thronged and venerated home of Right,
Liberty's temple, where the tribune's voice
Forbade the consul's edict, and none dared,
Without their will, to decimate for war,
Or spoil, in peace, the conscious citizen.
Now, beautified by Parian colonnades,
And jetting fountains and immortal busts
Of Rome's immortal mind, when power, conferred
In peril, was resigned in safety's arms,
Mid the Mosaic corridors and halls,
And priceless trophies of the matchless thought
Of Zeuxis and Apelles, and the forms
Of Phidias, warrior statues, giant steeds,
And consuls stern in look, austere in life,
Dispensing bondage from the Capitol,
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Or tributary diadems to earth—
Now o'er this pomp of intellect and might
The serpent spirit of a helot race,
Licking the dust of purple tyranny,
And crushing in its poison folds all thought
That dares be fetterless, and dreads but guilt—
Leaving the slime of ruin, with the hiss
Of shame and desolation, ever glides.
Mark the long pillared ranges to the east—
(A sceptered figure overtops the dome,
Her brazen scales are superfluities—)
In the Ausonian days ere heaven revoked
Its holiest gift to man; ere granite gods,
Sphynxes, cabiri, (3) apes and crocodiles
Became corrupted nature's deities,
There reigned Astraea, bright Aurora's child,
The Titan's seraph—gentle e'en to crime,
Radiant in beauty to the Good; the clouds
Of passion never darkened her sweet brow,
Revenge and hate and venal compact ne'er
Confronted her calm look of sanctity.
Then the Basilicæ were temples meet
For prayer and hymn to the Divinity,
And majesty and wisdom, peace and love
Dwelt with a sad yet just humanity.
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Alas, for the brief vision! and alas
For the world's madness! giant evil rushed
Through wrecked hearts and crushed spirits and o'erspread
All realms with unmasked vice, impurities
Unnameable, atrocities beyond
The untaught conception of the savage, till,
Casting earth's soil and burden from her wings,
The goddess rose to the elysian throne
She left to meet derision and despair.
Then grovelling men, amid abasements, groped
Through sacrilege and malady and vice,
The agonies of guilt without its shame,
Remorselessness and misery, to their home—
The sepulchre of painted infamies!
Thus felt, though feigning, pagan Rome's best minds:
And since the fated hour when faction raised
The tyrant's beacon banner and the blood
Of Cæsar stained his rival's pillar, none
Have stayed the deluge of unpunished wrong.
The Ambracian waters (4) were not deeper dyed
Than judgment in yon courts; there's not a stone,
That bears not witness, to the soul, of woe,
Injustice, calumny and death; wrung tears
Have stained the Prætor's seat of perfidy;
And sighs unsolaced through the long arcades
Echoed like voices of accusing ghosts;
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And hopeless shrieks ascended from the cells
Beneath the proud tribunal, where the will
Of one, that cannot be arraigned, dooms all
To endless anguish or unwitnessed death.
Alas, my Mariamne! while I gaze
On those most dreaded mansions, burning fears
Thrill my awed bosom, lest this mountain vault,
Dismal and dripping—the dark home of want—
And guiding to the abyss of flame or flood,
Perchance—may fail to shield us from the grasp
Of Diomede's apparitors! (5) forefend,
O Heaven! the hour of our betrayal! once
My stricken and stunned soul beheld the death—
Let us within, my love! my heart misgives
Even at the imagination of the power,
Ferocity and wantonness of him,
Whose sire—(and ne'er had father truer son)
Sejanus taught, Tiberius trusted in,
Caligula exalted; Nero loved
This subtle, quick Sicilian, and all since
Upon the imperial throne have left in place
Pompeii's Prætor—for his heart feels not!
Honored by these, what have not we to fear?
His minion's glance is ruin unto both!
My life, his prey, thy beauty—stand not so,
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Beyond the shadow of the precipice!
His seekers are abroad—the assassin games
Of you vast amphitheatre will feast,
Ere long, the merciless idolaters!
Enter the cavern, Mariamne! hark!
Some lichens fell from the steep rocks o'erhead—
A sandal hath dislodged them—yet no eye
Of mortal may discern us from the crag
That beetles there—again! I hear the fall
Of guarded steps—so, softly, love! within!”
Darkness along the rugged crypt—(wherein
The pard had sorted with the serpent, ere
The Roman Convert made his home there, sought
By the fierce demon of the idol faith)—
Floated in wreaths, and round the jutting rocks,
Whence trickled the hill fountains, drop by drop,
Mocking the pulses of each lingering hour,
Hung in its home of centuries; but now
Gloom e'en more terrible from thunder clouds
Rushed on the tempest's wings o'er every star
Of bright blue ether and the laughing earth,
(Breathed o'er by Zephyr from his vesper throne,
Late, when the oreads danced upon the mount,)
And winds in moaning gusts, like spirits doomed,
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Swept through the cavern; and the giant trees
Through their vast canopies their voices cast
Upon the whirlwind; and the Appenines
Loomed through the ghastly midnight, shadowing forms
Like earth-gods in the revel of their wrath,
Limitless and robed in vengeance hoarded up
Through ages of quick agony; and, whirled
In fury o'er the crags, huge boughs and leaves
And dust, leaving the gnarled grotesque roots bare,
Quivered along the sky; and lightning leapt
O'er cloven yet contending woods, from mass
To mass of all the surging sea of clouds,
That rioted amid the firmament,
Flashing like edicts from the infinite Mind
Of Godhead; and from sea, shore, cliff and vale
A deep wild groan in shuddering echoes passed
Through the earth's heart, and met the crash and howl
Of momentary thunders in mid air.
In silence from the moss couch of their cell,
Mid the deep arches of the grotto, prayer
Ascended from the pale lips but tried hearts
Of earth's unfriended exiles—heaven's redeemed;
And there, as o'er their voiceless orisons
The wild tornado's music rushed, the Faith
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Sublime, which through all torture and all dread
The Christian martyr in heaven's triumph bore,
Pervaded every thought that soared beyond
The doubt and fear and anguish of their fate.
The first vast masses of dark vapor poured
Their deluge, and the torrents from ravines
And precipices hurried, in wild foam,
To channels bright with verdure and dry beds
Of mountain lakes, flinging their turbid floods
Down the deep boiling chasm and with the sea,
Now hurling its tumultuous waves along
The echoing shores and up the promontories,
Conflicting for the masterdom. Each glen,
Tangled with thorns and shrubs, and each defile,
O'erhung with jagged cliffs, to the dread hymn
Of the night storm, shouted their oracles;
And from the summit of Vesuvius curled
A pyramid of dusky vapor, tinged
With a strange, smothered and unearthly light.
Portents and prophecies more awful fell
On every vigilant and awed sense than e'er,
From Pythia shrieking on the tripod, sent
Terror and madness to the undoubting heart.
But, while the hollow dirge of the strong blast
Startled the dreaming world, the unruffled minds
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Of the disciples with the Paraclete
Communed, and gathered from the cross new power
O'er famine, danger, loneliness and death.
“Thou fear'st not now, my Pansa! though the Mount
Unquenchable beneath us quakes; thy dread
Of human wrath—consorts it with thy trust
In God? thine eye shrinks not when all the heavens
Blaze, and thine ear shuts not when thunders burst,
Shocking the immensity; why fear'st thou man?”
“I know him; knowledge brings to all or hate
Or scorn or apprehension, as his deeds
Or our own nature waken: He, who died
For crime not his, hath taught my else fierce heart
Humility; derision and revenge
Assail me not, and, therefore, fear invades
My too acquainted spirit when the shade
Of Diomede along my lone thoughts stalks.
But from his revelations I do know
The Maker, and his loftiest name is Love,
And that consists not with the sceptic's dread.
Man, gifted with a might above all law,
With every passion by impunity
And rivalry of imperial guilt inflamed.
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(And such is this proconsul) must become
A dreaded despot, and the helpless heart,
That weds a persecuted faith and loves
A banished mortal, who on earth to him
Is as elysium, must from peril quail,
And shudder e'en at shadows menacing.”
“Yet paynim hate but hurls our thoughts to heaven,”
(Said Mariamne, e'en in woe like hers,
Thinking the thoughts which Miriam from the shores
Of Egypt's sea breathed o'er the tyrant host,)
“Their fountain first and final home, as feigned
Thy poet, of the Titans, thrown to earth
By might supernal, yet unconquering:
They from the bosom of their mother sprung
With renovated strength and added wrath
And hourly towering majesty of mien.
Man may destroy, but cannot desecrate;
May mock, but never can make vain our faith;
And if our hopes, like Christ's own kingdom, are
Not of this world, why should we linger on
In this unworthy fear, and shun the crown
Laid up for martyred witnesses of truth?
Let the worst come in the worst agonies!
We shall not part, my love! but for an hour;
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Nor shall we leave—the spoil of heathen scorn—
Bright sons and gentle daughters to endure
Inherited affliction, homeless need,
Perpetuated vengeance; round our hearts,
In the dread trial hour of tortured flesh,
The parent's matchless and undying love,
With all its blest endearments, and the charms
Of budding childhood's rainbow pleasantries,
Gushings of the soul's springtime, falling o'er
Maturer years, like sunbright dews of heaven,
Will never cling and chain our daunted minds
To earth's vain interests. We shall depart
Like sunbows from the cataract, renewed
By luminaries that have no twilight—where
Winter and hoar age, doubt, care, strife and fear,
The desert and the samiel, the realm
Of flowers and pestilence, the purple pomp
And tattered want of human life are not.
What say the Greek and Latin sages, love?
What Judah's peerless monarch, (6) mid the wealth,
The radiance and the perfumes and the power,
The majesty of thrones and diadems,
And the excess of mortal pleasure, said
In his immortal wisdom (how 't was soiled
By passion, in his age, for idol charms,
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Heaven knows and sorrows o'er humanity,)
Ambition, pride, pomp, pleasure—all
Are but the vanities that tempt man on
To shame, satiety and death—or worse,
Reckless dishonor and shunned solitude,
Living with dire remembrances of joy.”
“The God, my Mariamne! that for guilt,
Incurred in other states or other worlds,
Ere the great cycles brought our being here,
(As some have deemed, if erring or inspired
I know not) clothed our spirits in this robe
Of frail flesh, subject to necessities
From birth to burial, ne'er debased the mind
Unto the body's weakness, yet left not
Thought, at all seasons, master of our clay.
Wander not oft the wisest? sink not oft
The strong? and blench the fearless? and delay
To reason with blasphemers the most skilled?
And tamper with temptation, the most pure?
In the imparted strength of heaven I trust,
When the last trial of my faith shall come,
That the disciple will not prove apostate.
But having thee, my bride! e'en from the mouth
Of this wild Cacus vault, that looks beneath
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Into the chaos of the mountain gorge,
The air, the forest, the blue glimmering waves,
The meadows with their melodies, the cliffs
Curtained by countless waving vines, or dark
With desolate magnificence, o'erwhelm
My soul with grandeur, love and beauty, till,
Uttering to thee the bliss which nature breathes,
And thrilled by her seraphic eloquence,
I mingle with the tenderness and bloom,
The music, majesty, and loveliness
Of her unfolded scenes, and shrink to meet
The power that rends away these charms—this love
So sternly proved through each uncertain hour
Since from the sanctuary wreathed with flame
I snatched thee, as the Judge of that wild night
Did from the dark faith of the Pharisee.
Life pure amid corruption, will to bear
Protracted evil, gratitude for all
The gifts of God, and prayer and praise in grief,
May prove a sacrifice to heaven not less
Than all the tortures of the martyrdom.
The tempest passes, and the night wears on;
The dome of heaven is filled with prophecies!
With voices low, but heard where breathless thoughts
Are oft the most accepted music, let
Our evening hymn ascend, and then to rest.”
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From the wild cavern's still profound,
From cliffs that bend o'er viewless flame,
Our spirits soar beyond the bound
Of being to THY hallowed name.
In gloom and peril, God! thou art
Our hope amid the lion's lair,
And from the desolated heart,
Redeemer! hear our midnight prayer!
The lustres of our lives are few,
On darkened earth, our bliss still less,
Yet daybeam fragrance, evelight dew
Hear our heart-hymns in lone distress:
By no green banks, as prayed our sires,
Our thoughts win heaven to Time's despair,
But we are heard by seraph choirs—
Hear thou, O Christ! our midnight prayer!
No magian charms or mystic dreams,
Or Delian voices, uttering doubt,
By fountains dim and shadowy streams,
The fear, the awe of doom breathe out;
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By shrines, red bolts have sanctified,
While dragons haunted meteor air,
We worship not as shadows glide—
Redeemer! hear our midnight prayer!
The breathing earth, the gleaming heaven,
The song of sea, mount, vale, and stream,
While dimness waves o'er holy even,
Blend our glad souls with beauty's beam;
But darkness, danger, torrents raise
Our hope to Thee, Death-victor! where
In virgin light fly tearless days—
Redeemer! hear our midnight prayer!
The bard bereaved from Orcus' gloom,
Through Hades, led his love to light,
And thine adorers from thy tomb
Drink glory in their being's night;
More blest to need, as thou didst, Lord!
Than be the Phrygian monarch's heir,
Wanting the rapture of thy word—
Redeemer! hear our midnight prayer!
Judea's incense-hills are dim
And silent, where the song went up;
Hushed holy harp and temple hymn—
The slayer drinks the spoiler's cup!
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Earth o'er the sophist's vision sighs,
O'er deeds, king, priest, and people dare,
And wilt thou not from pitying skies,
Redeemer! hear our midnight prayer!
Loosed from dark homage unto Fear,
Imaged in lar and teraphim,
And Delphian voice and Ebal seer,
Thy bright revealments round us swim,
Pouring upon the path we tread,
Though perill'd, lone, and rough and bare,
Light that inspires the martyred dead!
Redeemer! hear our midnight prayer!
In sleep and vigil, guard and guide,
In secret quest of earthly food,
From outward foes and inward pride,
And the fiend's wiles in solitude!
O'er idol rites Thy radiance pour,
Till, like the myriad worlds of air,
The Universe, as one, adore!
Redeemer! hear our midnight prayer!
“What terrible and ghastly blaze flares through
The cavern, filling its abyss with flame?”
Said Pansa, startling from the grotto's gloom,
As the last gentle breathings of the song
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Whispered along the arches, and with step
Like hunted antelope he sprung to the edge
Of his dark home of banishment. “Behold!
The surges of the tempest fluctuate
In fierce tumultuous masses 'neath yon orb
Of livid fire that from the north careers
O'er the astonished and convulsed firmament!
Nor terror nor surprise is in thy look,
For well thou know'st that awful herald, seen
Through uncreated shadows of events
By Him who mourned o'er ruin while the pomp
Of thy Jerusalem before Him glowed.
The comet! meteor of despair to man!
Like a condemned, demolished world of flame,
With a vast atmosphere of torrent fire,
It traverses immensity with speed
Confounding thought, hurled on by viewless power
Omnipotent and unimagined, robed
In dreadful beauty—heaven's volcano—home,
Perchance, of those gigantic spirits cast
From holiness to hopelessness for pride.
Lo! how it sweeps o'er the sky's ocean! wreaths
Of purple light along its borders mount
What seem innumerable colonnades
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Wrought by the seraphim, most meet to bear
A temple huge as Atlas; and the hues
Deeper and lovelier than prismatic lights,
Curl o'er the quivering arch as if to roof
The vast mysterious fabric of the sea
Of clouds that throng eternity, to which
Egypt's most mighty pyramid were not
More than a tinted shell to Caucasus.
Are those, that swirl like wrecks amid the surf,
Vast mountains wrenched from their abysses, thrown
From one fire billow's bosom and engulphed
To be again hurled on another's crest?
Lo! through the sky, air-rocks, hissing and red,
From the volcanic worlds of heaven descend!
What terrors of infinity they speak!
What revelations of undying power!
What be yon dark and spectral images
That through the bickering fiery waves move slow
Yet haughtily? oh, what a furnace glare
Rolled o'er the shadows then, and left their forms
Radiant with ruin! and above, methinks,
Broad wings of diamond brilliance wave and flash.
Gift me thy wisdom, Love! what said thy sires
Of such revealments of divinity?”
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“Seldom they came and brandished o'er the world
Their flickering and serpent tongues of flame:
Seldom—for generations, centuries passed,
And men saw not the burning heavens o'erwrit
In gory characters of forewarned fate.
Yet deemed our sages, least of dust, that all
The meteors warring with the myriad worlds,
That circle through the abyss of air, had been,
Ere man, time, death, or sin was, stars of bloom,
Casting their beauty and their fragrance on
The zephyr, hymning on their flight through space
The Maker, and awaiting life to fill
Their groves and valleys with the prayer and song.
Yon shattered mass of boiling minerals
Thus in its whirlwind madness driven on
O'er shocked and startled ether, star-skilled eyes
Of the Captivity's prophetic eld,—
(When from the Temple in his triumph all
Jehovah's holy shrines to wanton Jove
Were borne by the proud Flavian victor) saw
Beneath the horizon, ere, in arcs and wreaths
And pillars canopied by thunder folds,
The spiral torrents of volcanic fire
Precipitated through the sphere of earth.
Much in dread visions when between the wings
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Of cherubim the Glory rested—much
In banishment and desert solitude—
And more in ruin to the soul of seers
Was given to know; more than all human thought
By all its systems can impart to man.
Yet with least erring eye the Apostle saw,
What time he felt the martyr's hovering crown.
The cohorts of the conqueror, when we trod—
(A banished nation, from our birth-soil rent,
Helpless and homeless, hurled upon the spear),—
The path of bondage, paused beneath the hill
Of sycamores, when the meridian sun
Flung his fierce arrowy splendors; and around
The cool o'ershadowed fountains, scowling on
The scorched and agonizing captives, lay
The imperial legions, casting bitter scorn
And ribald merriment on each who passed
Among their stern battalions to assuage
His deadly thirst:—scarce deigned plebeian hate
This solitary solace;—and they held
Each pilgrim by the beard to bid him bow
In worship to the dread Labarum, (7) ere,
In terms of mockery, they questioned him
Of the sacked temple's holy spoils—what gold
The chalices, cups, lavers, shrines would bring
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To the vast coffers of the Palatine.
With lips unmoistened, weary, sick in soul,
I turned aside into a dreary rift
Of rock o'erbowered with briar and aconite,
To pray and perish, for I had on earth
No friend! my father, on that morn, had laid
His weary head upon my breaking heart
And died. They bound him to a blighted tree
Upon a desert crag, and, to my shrieks
Shouting, “The traitor may forget the path
The Avenger treads! let him look on to Rome!”
The savage spoilers dragged me from his corse.
Thus to the earth I cast me, wailing low,
When a hand lifted me, and I beheld
A form, a face, so towering, worn and full
Of blended intellect and sanctity,
Of majesty and mildness, that, methought,
'Twas the Love-Angel! and his look o'erspread
My soul with joy inscrutable, he held
The very spirit so; and then his voice
Passed through the mind's depths like a cherub hymn.
“Daughter!” he said, “one doom is sealed in blood!
The Holy City, stained by guilt, defiled
By treason, sacrilege and rapine, sleeps
In dust—and who but God shall bid her wake?
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Yet judgment tarries not, because the arm
Of Rome's proud Desolator worked the will
Of heaven, fulfilling his own ruthless lust.
Thou shalt behold the destiny of them
Who from the furnace of ambition cast
Their brands of ruin o'er the world—for me—
The numbered hours rush on. My daughter! hear!
Thou art the child's child of one great in all
That magnifies the mind and fills the heart
With earth's sublimest influences—all
That clothes our flesh with spotless robes, and claims
Man's loftiest veneration, and heaven's love.
Gamaliel, thy wise ancestor”— My soul
Glowed at the name, and, gazing on that face
Which never blanched with fear though tyrants frowned,
Nor in success exulted, proud of gifts,
Quickly I said, “Who should have talked with him,
Master in Israel, and yet survive
When all, save this wrecked spirit, dream not now?”
“'Tis Saul of Tarsus!” said he, with his eyes
Downcast in pale contrition: “he who first
Bore faggot, brand and crucifix, and watched
O'er the red garments of the martyred saint;
And, when the Temple's vail was rent, and heaven
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Shuddered as the pale King of Shadows waved
His sceptre o'er the Son of God,—was held
Aloft, amidst the people, to behold
Him by our sires blasphemed and slain.—If toil,
Baffled temptation, patient suffering,
Perils by land and wave, and every ill
Mortality hath borne—added to zeal
And many years of vigil thought, may hope
For pardon of my crime, I have not lacked.
But, daughter! as I rested on my path,
Girdled by foes exulting, I beheld
Thee clinging to thy parted sire, and sought
In secret to unfold, now in thy grief,
The sole Redemption our lost fathers spurned.””
She paused as on its wandering orbit now
Rushed madlier the lost star, and, gazing, cried;
“—But mark red Ruin's summoner! beneath
The quivering zenith and the zodiac dimmed
By his storm glories, how the herald scorns
The dominations of the dust, and dares
The loftiest hierarchies of the heaven!
Ghastly with lava light, the molten clouds
In cloven masses swirl before his path,
And with the crash and uproar of the war
Of all the antagonizing elements,
The demon comet cleaves the shuddering air!”
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“And now the fiend-king of the meteor flings
His glance on the voluptuous wantonness
Of Baiae and Pausylipo, upon
The fairest bosom of earth's beauty laid
To stain, defile and desecrate! beyond,
The waters of Parthenope, along
The curved and blossomed shores, from the dark brow
Of the Misenum to Surrentum rocks
And Capreae's isle of carnage, curl and moan,
Darkened with gory hues; and on the expanse
So beautiful in crystal claritude
On yester morn, the trailing glare hangs now
With tempest gloom contending, yet unmixed.
The promontories and proud Appenines
Seem to uplift their precipices o'er
The wild air and affrighted sea in dread;
And the deep forests, quaking yet beneath
The Alpine torrent blast, through all their clouds
Of leaves, drink the dark crimson streams that pour
In lurid cataracts of flame from heaven:
And every breathing thing—man, beast, tree, flower—
Pants in the siroc that from Lybian sands
Hastens to mingle with the withering breath
Of yon gigantic world of Death!—my frame
Is numbed by torpor, yet the terror holds
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My spirit captive to the majesty
Of the unearthly Desolator!—Love!
Thou with the great Apostle didst commune—
O God! I saw him die!—the prophet said?”
“ “Fulfilled, by Christian faith, the Law, whose voice
Was judgment to our fathers, by the blood
Of the One Victim unto all becomes
The very soul of Love!” Thus he began,
And with an angel eloquence, that thrilled
My humbled heart, interpreted the law,
That spake in thunders from the Desert Mount,—
He, the Awakener of nations, whose high gifts,
E'en in the grandest spheres of fame, had won
The palm and laurel crown, but that in vain
Cajoling tempters spread their blandishments
And the seducings of apt sophistries
Tangled their meshes round him. Affluence,
Dominion o'er the treasures and the thoughts
Of traitor worshippers, the feigned awe breathed
By vassal sycophants through tainted courts,
Thronged temples, porticoes, and schools of seets,
He cast aside as winds do dust to dust.
He felt his intellect's supremacy,
And shrunk from moulded clay that lipped his name
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In interested ecstacies—he knew
Himself and sought not other knowledge here.
In place of men's dissembled treacheries,
He, clothed with immortality's own light,
Pictured the Passion, spread the Eucharist,
Bade peril and the equinox obey,
Soothed the quick pangs of lonely malady,
Warded the fold of faith assailed, and stood
In every danger on the vanward tower
To watch, guard, counsel, lead, bear scorn, and die!
Brief was our converse, for the Flavian trump,
In triumph echoes, startled the great host.
But, from that hour, through agony and shame,
I have not trembled to confess the Word,
Whose smile is, e'en in the worst evil, heaven.
“Farewell! my captive child!” he said, “when power
Purples the rills with Christian sacrifice,
And wanton crime mocks thy unpitied moans,
Forget not Calvary and Gethsemane!
Forget not that my eye beholds e'en now,
Down the dark lapses of Time unconceived,
A terrible atonement of the doom
Knelled o'er the domes of Salem; wildly o'er
Infinitude the vision rushes—earth
With shrieks of wrath and quick convulsions hails
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The herald of despair—it whirls and leaps,
Like living madness now, and tosses o'er
Unterminating and unsounded air
Perpetual deluges of flame, to warn
The scoffer and the rioter, who mark
No beam beyond their revel glare! Farewell!
Desolate daughter of a slaughtered sire!
Forget not! and the Paraclete console
Thy lingering sorrows! mine are almost done!”
The fountain of my heart o'erflowed; I looked,
Yet never more beheld the godlike brow
Of Christendom's apostle; through the shades
Of the descending cavern slowly waved
His mantle, the white turban seemed to hang
A moment in the gloom; his sandalled feet
Sent back a few low sounds—and he had passed
Unto his mission and his martyrdom!
But tell me, love! beneath this ghastly light,
The story of his doom (8)—how passed his soul
From torture into triumph when the flesh
Clung round the spirit in its agony?”
“In calm magnificence—in meekness fit
To awe earth's congregated dynasties,
From gloom to glory, through its martyrdom,
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It passed—triumphing mid the jeers of men!”
Said Pansa, casting on the o'erhung crags
And piles of rifted scoriæ half green'd o'er,
(Beauty embracing ruin), mid the intense hush
Of o'erworn nature, glances of quick thought,
As silently he caught faint smothered sounds
Like breaths held back, and then, at intervals,
Gasping in sobs, like night sighs of the surf.
With startled ear, strained eye and quivering brow,
Listened the Christian; but the dells lay still
In their green blessedness, the hills looked down
From their cold solitudes; above, the flame
Of the banned star flared far and dim—beneath,
Lay Pompeii, folded in the sleep that flings
Oblivion o'er the exhaustion of desire;
And, breathing terror from his burdened heart,
He thus portrayed the passion of the Saint.
“No psalteries or cymbals poured their waves
Of music round his death-hour; no grand hymn
Gushed from the tabret, and no gentle voice
Of sorrow from the harp, to wail his doom.
Alone amid his slayers and the foes
Of Him they crucified, Paul calmly stood,
Nor daring pagan hate nor dreading it,
His white hair streaming on the autumnal wind;
His countenance, treached o'er by thought and care
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And toil and suffering, gathered, as he looked
Upon the Prætor on his throne of power,
The grandeur of his youth, the matchless light
Of a triumphant intellect that grasped
An immortality of bliss, and feared
No mortal agony when joy was death.
`Thou art a Christian?' Paul held up the Cross.
`Thou art a Hebrew?' `Ay, I was, and worse.'
`Thou art a Traitor?' `Not to God or man!'
Cried the Apostle, and his monarch form
Rose from the ruins of his years, and stood,
Like the unpeered statue of Olympian Jove,
Before the quailing Paynim. `Edicts, hurled
By Agrippina's son, had Rome a soul,
E'en from blasphemed humanity would call
For vengeance on the utterer. Where's the guilt
Of thought? the crime of faith, whose very soul
Is low-voiced worship and still charities?
The loftiest mind most loves humility!
The imperial ban ('twas uttered by the banned)
Leaves deeds untouched but criminates the thought;
Hales famished, homeless and (for this vain world)
Hopeless believers of an humble faith,
To judgment, not to trial, and allows
The apostacy, it arraigns as crime
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Death or denial! is the only law
Of Rome, whose wings are o'er the world, to men
So poor, they have no pillow, and so few,
They have no power; and yet the Palatine
Fears they—they may subert its giant might!
Is truth so terrible to the `immortal gods,'
That they in triumph tremble at a voice?
Dreads the fierce Thunderer the cicada's song?
Or your gay god of Revels, lest the charm
Of his wreathed thyrsus may depart when woods
And caverns are the palaces, and rills
And berries all the banquet of his foes?
Yet none of all thy fabled deities,
Save hirsute fauns and lonely oreads,
Behold our rites, or need shrink to behold.
How should conspiracy consort with want
And weakness so extreme, they lack the power
To lift the dying head or bear the corse
Beyond the grotto where they weep and pray?
And who of all Rome's judges can arraign
The Christian for a deed that could design
Possession of a hamlet? or a hut?
We seek no empire save untrammelled thought;
We court no patron save The Crucified;
We win no crown save that of martyrdom.'
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`Smite, silence the blasphemer!' shrieked the judge,
Robing his fear in wrath; `too long we waste
The Empire's time—chain the conspirator!
And, lictors! guard his cross from slaves, and all
The baser multitudes that throng to hear
The maniac treasons of the Nazarenes.
Hoar breeder of sedition, thou must die!'
`Nature said that when I was born, and God,
Ere that, a thousand ages, when sin rose
From Hades; not in vain have all the power,
Splendor and guilt of Rome before me passed
In danger yet in solitude, and now
I fold unto my bosom that deep death
I never sought nor feared, and thank the ruth
Of that derision which ordains the Cross.
The master of your vast—of every realm,
Sea, earth and sky hold, taught me by His groan
That the last breath was agony, but He
Hath sent the Paraclete to o'ershadow all
Who perish by his passion, and I go,
Purple idolater! having wandered long
Through many years of weariness, to rest,
Where, couldst thou ever share my bliss, this hour,
With less of anguish, would pass o'er my soul!'
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Then led they him unto (9) the Accursed Field
Beyond the Patriot's Precipice, mid bands
Of mailed Prætorians, bearing in the blaze
Of noon Cæsar's Labarum (ne'er unfurled
But in the triumph's tempest;) in the van
The aruspices in purple trabeæ walked, (10)
Their oakleaf chaplets waving: then in throngs,
The Luperci, the maddened priests of Mars,
In crimson togas and broad burnished plates
Of brass that mirrored carnage, followed quick.
And the wild flamens of Cybele, stained
By the red vintage, and the countless crowd
Of magi, augurs, senators and slaves,
Paphians and vestals, through the marble streets,
From dusky lanes and sculptured palaces,
Temple and forum and Cimmerian den,
Outpoured in pageantry or squalid want,
Like Scylla's whirlpool floods, to feast on death.
'Twas ever thus in Rome; she nursed her horde
Of bandits, from the first, on blood, and war,
Wedding with carnage, wrote her very creed
In groans, and wrought her gods from myriad crimes.
So on they led the martyr stooping low
Beneath the felon cross, his glorious brow,
Oft wet with dungeon dew, soiled by the dust
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Of the armed cohort, yet his undimmed eye
Flashing its birthlight radiance unto heaven,
Drinking revealments of God's paradise.
Oath, menace, jeer and ribald mockeries,
The vulgar's worship of all greatness, passed
Like the sirocco o'er Campanian flowers
Or snowpiles of the Appenines, gathering bloom
And zephyr coolness, o'er his sainted soul.
His lofty nature did, a moment, seem
Burning in scorn upon his lips, and once,
Clasping the heavy cross as't were a wand,
He lifted his proud form and matchless head,
And o'er the helmed lictors looked upon
The mockers—and they shrunk beneath his glance
Like grass beneath the samiel; yet no more,
Hushing the spirit of his grandeur, he
Deigned to deem earth his home, or earthly things
Fit wakeners of his thought. And so he came
Unto the Accursed Field, and one, all shunned,
Loathing, drave down the massy cross. whereon,
With lingering patience, he had stretched and nailed,
Through palm and sole, the Martyr, every blow
Tearing the impaled nerves, and through heart and brain
Sending a sick convulsion; but the pangs
Passed quickly o'er his features, though the limbs
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Quivered, and, as he looked to heaven, a light,
Brighter than universes of bright suns,
Fell round the Martyr in his agony!
`A Prodigy! Jove flashes wrath! the gods
Forbid the death!' shouted the multitude,
Like foliage fluctuating, as the spells
Of all-believing Fear fell on their hearts.
`All Rome shall perish if the Christian dies!'
`Hence, vassals! fools! home to your huts! away!'
Rose the proud Prefect's quick, stern, ruthless voice,
Whose echo was an oracle. `Ye slaves!
The beast should batten on the slain, I know,
And ye can taunt and torture helplessness,
And dread the very shade of danger's ghost;
But, by the Spectre River! Rome's best spears
Shall search your dastard dust, if ye but speak
Ere each adores his hearth-god! hence! away!'
The Gracchi from the Aventine dragged forth (11)
For senators to slaughter well displayed
The liberties of Rome; and they, who held
The Briton chief barbarian, shrunk away,
When a patrician bade, without a voice!
But bondage and brute violence are one.
Then, as the steps of the vast throng retired
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Like dying waves, the priests and guards outspread
Their banquet on the plain beneath the tents—
(The kalends of the seventh month had come)
They bore to shield the sun, while there they watched
The fever, famine, thirst and pangs of death.
Pheasants, Falernian, mirth, song, jest and oath
Inspired the revel 'neath the cross, and all
Care and command, save that which bade them see
The Martyr die, fled from their spirits now.
Wanton with wine, the priest revealed to scorn
His wiles and sophistries and oracles,
Blessing the phantom gods that shadows held
Dominion o'er the conscious fears of men.
Warriors portrayed, in tales of other climes,
Numidia, Arcady or Syrian realms,
The splendor of the spoil, the gems and gold,
The perfumes, luxuries and regal robes,
Fair slaves and diamonds, wafted from the shores
Of the Orient, in homage to the diadem
That circled nations. Many a demon deed
And dark career of crime then first to light
Leapt from the dizzy brain of guilt, and moved
Applause and rival histories of acts
O'erpast; how dusky kings in palaces,
Amid their pomp, gleaming magnificence,
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Did perish in the flame, and none could save
The victim, though they bore his coffers forth
How queens and virgin princes in their bowers,
On broidered couches slumbering, while their robes,
Like zodiacs, glittered in the purple light,
Felt not the serpent that trailed o'er their sleep,
But died in their pavilions, voicelessly!
Then senators and knights, with mutual mirth,
Discoursed of laws enacted or suppressed
As suited Cæsar, and quenched liberties,
Naming them treason; and asserted rights,
They branded as seditions; and revealed
To the unshuddering guards the mysteries
Of Rome's proud Forum, where the agonies
Of desolated kingdoms, and the shrieks
Of nations in their bondage, and the tears
Of eloquent affection to the lords
Of power were music and unholy mirth.
Then round the martyr mingled voices rose
Louder, and laughter to impiety
Replied, and men, the gods, truth, chastity,
Love, honor, courage and fidelity,
All were but mockeries to the rioters.
“Hercle! is this the Lupercal? ye howl
Like Conscript Fathers when the spoil is lost!
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Peace!” said the Prefect—“see ye not the lips
Of yon hoar traitor trembling with quick thought?
Listen! he speaks his last,—his heart 's too old
To linger in the torture of the tree!”
“The isles shall wait, Jehovah! for thy law, (12)
And knowledge to and fro shall spread, till earth
Utter Thy praise like voices of the sea!”
Thus spake the victim, in delirium,
Wrought by deep anguish, wandering yet among
The dear homes of his mission. “Dangers wave
Their wings around us, brethren! and the waste,
Boundless and shadowless, must still be trod!
Yet not by dim lights of a doubting faith
Are ye led on through wrong and woe and want,
For the Anointed hath not left us here
Without a Comforter, and hath He not
Laid up, in many mansions, crowns of joy,
Where mortal doth put on immortality?
Grieve not the Spirit! yet a little while,
And ye shall reap the harvest and rejoice;
And though, ere then, this flesh must see decay,
Yet I shall mingle with your prayer and hymn,
By morn and eve—and breathe the Savior's smile
O'er the glad isles of Gentiles so beloved!”
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Then spasms of vivid pain passed o'er his face,
His eyes rolled back upon the brain, and left
The pale streaked orbs writhing in gloom—the lids
Now folded to their lashes, coiling now
In nature's deep convulsion, till the veins,
O'erfraught and purple, on his cloven brow,
Seemed bursting o'er the altar of his soul.
His livid lips, parted by torture, breathed
Deep undistinguished murmurs, then compressed
Like sculptured curves and lines of thought; the limbs,
Meantime, grew cold, and the dark gathering blood
Forsook its own familiar temple, when
The shadows of the sepulchre stole on.
“Dis leaves his realm to welcome him,” said one.
“Peace! thou discourteous knight! jeers skill not now;
Thy mirth is motlied with mortality,
And thou thyself mayst pray for Lethe ere
The graceless Stygian grasps thine obolus.
Put on thy knighthood! peace! he speaks again!”
And the proud Prefect flung his casque to earth.
In moans, like autumn gusts, the martyr spake,
Hovering o'er shattered memories like the sun
O'er broken billows of the shoreless sea!
“Let me behold thy domes, Damascus! meet
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It is the arrows of Life's penitence
Should pierce the persecutor.—Oh, farewell!
My brother! blessed in Pisidia be
Thy walk and watching!—To the Unknown God!
Are ye the worshipped wisdom of all Greece,
When ye disdain your thrice ten thousand gods,
Adoring Doubt or Demon, knowing not
The Deity revealed?—Ye can attest,
I have not coveted the gold of earth,
The gorgeous raiment or vain pomp of men,
But ministered, in all, unto myself!
Ay, driven to and fro in Adria
Upon Euroclydon, no hope is left
But in the Wielder of the wave and wind.
Despair not! though sun, moon and stars are hid,
Jehovah watches from eternity!
Contend not, brethren! untaught man may win
Redemption from the deep crimes of his age,
And be a law unto himself; e'en Rome
Hath in her years of darkest guilt had such.
Oh, sorrow not like them who have no hope!
The seed shall not decay though I am dust!
—Why do ye scourge me, soldiers? know ye not
I am a Roman? I appeal to Cæsar!
—Bring me a winter robe when thou dost come
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Again—the night is cold among the hills,
And I am very weary! so, farewell!”
Then the bare nerves and sinews sent their pangs
For the last time upon his fainting heart,
And, as beyond the trembling battlements
Of agonizing flesh, the spirit strove
To flee, beholding heaven, the bitter strife
O'erawed the infidel, and round the cross
Stood silent pagan revellers! Once more
The apostle's peerless mind gleamed out—his eyes,
Living in the dark light of boyhood, flung
Their dying splendors o'er the Imperial Hills,
The mountains and the waters—while his pulse
Intensely throbbed and paused—and the heart's chill
And fever rushed to life's deep fount and spread
A shuddering faintness and sick gasping sense
Of falling through infinitude, o'er all
The vital functions of his frame. “My God!”
'Twas but a hollow echo from the tomb,
Yet it said “Jesus! let me—see—Thy face!”
And Saul of Tarsus stood before his God!”
“As thou shalt stand before Gaetulia's king,
The Barcan lion!” cried the ruthless voice
Of Diomede's outwatching messenger,
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The undeterred achiever of his will—
Grasping the Christian while his fellows rushed
Upon his pale but dreadless Hebrew bride.
“Well!” said the minion, “traitors serve, sometimes,
The empire's weal, and martyrdom, methinks,
Hath a rare syren music, for ye stood
Grandly before us in the comet light,
Wrapt in your exalted Nazarene,
Till we could climb the cliffs and do the hest
Of the proconsul, unfulfilled too long!
Come, Rabbi! thou art skilled in subterfuge,
And hast not scorned the sword in better times—
The games shall test thy genius—on with me!
The Gladiator's banquet waits, and thou
Shalt quaff the massic or the tears of Christ. (13)
Veles! thou hast thy charge! the Prætor's coin
Rewards not slack obedience, though his wrath
Ne'er palters with a thought of treachery!
The lady—Venus! but she hath a brow
Like the coy Delian queen!—must be disposed,
With all respect,—lead on! the daystar wanes!”
“Thraso! we were not foes when, side by side,
We scaled Antonia's tower, and saw the walls
Of Zion crushed—Why now? thou art disguised,”
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Said Pansa, with the heart's best eloquence,
As down the steep crags turned the lictor band,
Bearing his bride. “Why from my heart, by guile
Betrayed, by violence asunder rent,
Tearst thou my Mariamne, mocking thus?”
“And dost thou ask, apostate? hast thou not
Contemned the gods, scorning thy father's faith?
Forsaken the eagle banners, deeming rocks
Better than camps? and sowed sedition, thick
As sand-clouds, through the legions? thou hast wed
A captive, too, whom, though with all thy gold
Thou bought'st, poor fool! yet hast not held, as bids
The law, in bondage! dost thou ask again?
Mine office deigns no farther word, but more
Thou soon shalt learn in bitterness! lead on!”
“Bear me with her, where'er ye drag, whate'er
Ye or your lords in lawlessness inflict!
No more my voice shall crave or ye deny!”
“The Prætor's edict suits no purposes
Apostates may desire; your destinies
Have separate mansions, renegade!” Along
Ravine and precipice and lava bed,
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Vineyard, pomegranate grove and vale of bloom,
The Pagan haled his victims, till the gate
Of Pompeii flew wide, and Pansa saw,
In speechless agony, a moment ere
The Mamertine abysses (14) were his home,
Pale shuddering Mariamne through the gloom
Of statues, pillars, temples and hushed streets,
Where fountains only witnessed deeds of death,
Borne like a shadow to a nameless doom.
END OF CANTO I.
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-- --
THE LAST NIGHT OF POMPEII. CANTO II.
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Vandal and violater, Time! thou art
The spirit's master—the heart's mocker! thou
Pourest the deluge of returnless years
Over the gasping bosom, and on thought,
That, in aurora streams of magic light,
Flung its deep glory o'er the heavens, dost heap
Clouds without flame or voice, cold, deep and dark,
Which are the shroud of the mind's sepulchre!
Far better not to be than thus to be!
Better to wander like the gossamer,
The baffled buffet of each aimless wind,
Than sink like dial shadows, all but breath
Leaving the wreck that trembles on the strand.
And why to man, feeble in youth's best hours
Of intellect and power, in all his hopes
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So false unto himself and his compeers,
Are strength and pride and potency assigned?
Why is his grandeur wedded to despair?
His love to grief? his heart to hopelessness?
His fame and his dominion to the dust?
Yet thou, Tyrant of Air! hast chronicles
Of darker import, and the world is filled
With thine unpitying ministers of woe.
Beneath the rush of thy dark pinions nought
Lives, or life lingers, breathing at its birth
The death that soon becomes an ecstacy.
Wan yet not hoary, broken at the goal
Of young ambition, myriads feel thy flight
In torture and desire in vain to sleep.
Earth's beauty, heaven's magnificence, the charms
Of zephyrs, verdure, azure, light, hills, streams,
And forests, castelled by eternal rocks,
Beheld long, fade upon the sated soul,
Exhaust by their sublimities, and shed
Their fragrance, music and romance on hearts
Inured and soiled—too weak to bear their bliss,
Too cold to feel their glories! And we roam
The paradise of all earth's pleasantries,
Amid the care, toil, phrenzy, want and strife
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Of the protracted agonies of breath,
Feeding on raptures, that, fulfilled, are woes!
But o'er thy ruins, Time! and the thick clouds
Of the heart's mysteries a sun shall burst,
As now Apollo's steeds, caparisoned
In mornbeam hues, rush up the Appenines,
Star-eyed Eous and wild Phlegon first,
Pouring the sungod's splendors o'er the domes
Of Pompeii waking from her last still sleep.
As from the violet pavilions stole
The dayspring's beautiful and blessed light,
Like rose-leaves floating, and the mountains bent
Their awful brows in worship at the fount
Of radiance, by all ages sacred held
As the peculiar home of deity,
Mythra or Bel or Elios—the name
Erred, but the spirit brooded o'er the heavens,
Up rose the vassals from their earth-beds, late
On yesternight pressed by the sinking limbs
And breaking hearts of bondage; no perfumes
Needed the stripe-gashed body or shorn head:
No lavers waited thraldom; on they flung
Rude garments soiled by servitude, and turned
To grind at the accursed mill, and lift
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Their branded brows at the stern master's voice,
In silence passing o'er Mosaic floors
To bear the golden bowl or myrrhine cup,
Falernian or frankincense to their lords.
For them no statue bowed in majesty,
No consul framed a law, and none of all
The common deeds of earth had interest,
For they were stricken from the roll of men
And banished from humanity, (15) and Rome
Gazed from the temple of her trophies on
The hopeless captives—from her triumph hills,
Where armies shouted Liberty! upon
Her myriads of bondmen, with a smile,
That thanked her thrice ten thousand deities,
The o'ershadowing empire of the world was Free!
Waking to want from dreams of affluence,
Parting from splendor to meet toil and tears,
Then rose pale Indigence in shattered cells,
Dusky and damp and squalid, yet o'ertaxed
By the imperial rescript, to endure
The taunts of mimes, the old indignities
Of freedmen, merciless in novel power,
The insolence of taskers and the shame
Of slack dismissal with their pittance, when
The proud patrician deigned to bid his slave
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Cast the base drachms at the plebeian's feet!
Ere melted the wreathed mists from isle or mount,
City or lake, while Pompeii's pinnacles
Ascended in uncertain grandeur yet,
The artizan went forth to build again
The fabrics earthquakes had late sported with;
Doomed, ere the dial rested shadowless,
To cease from toil for ever!—and the sounds
Of early servile labor multiplied
Through glimmering arcades and noisome courts
Thronged ever by the peasants pomp creates,
As the sun gathered up his streaming rays,
And his broad disk lanced light o'er all the earth.
Late, from their holy dreams in the profound
Of their proud temples, ne'er by foot profane
Invaded, waked the pagan oracles,
The ministers of mysteries all unrevealed,
Save to the forgers of the fictions,—gazed
Bewildered on the amphoræ that stood
Beneath their sacred stores (16)—and turned, once more,
To matin visions of deluding faith,
Processions and responses, gorgeous robes,
Banquets, and free bequests when they alone
Stood o'er the dying, and dominion bought
-- 072 --
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By endless cycles of hypocrisies.
All hierarchies, howsoe'er unlike
In ritual, are in earthly hope the same;
Pleasure, their idol, ease, their ecstacy,
Power, their ambition, and the will of God,
The blasphemed agency of their own lusts.
The virgin dew yet on the verdure hung,
When, one by one, the mourners of the lost
Stole to the street of sepulchres and sat
Beside the ashes of their ancestors,
Watching the beams that never more would greet
The perished, and, they thought not, never more
Light Pompeii to her loved festivities!
Few, on this mission of elysian love,
Left Tyrian couches and the bliss of sense;
Yet they were blessed in the seraphic gift
Of feeling, which, in solitude, is heaven!
Tombs were the earliest temples, the first prayers
Gushings of grief, the holiest offerings,
Tears of bereavement, and the loveliest hymns,
Sighs over the departed; worship, then,
Rose from the heart, that, mid these simple rites;
Felt no delusion or vain mystery:
Urns were the altars, and the incense, love.
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The sodden pulse, offered by humble faith,
Desiring not demanding, far outweighed
Oblations chosen from harbaric spoils;
And with a purer purpose, poverty
Knelt by the wayside image of the god
Than gorgeous pontiffs by Olympian shrines
When sin gains sanction and the heart is soiled
By unrebuked, ay, customary crime,
The tenderest yearnings of the bosom—love,
With its dependence and delight—its smile,
Like rifted rose-leaves, and its tear, like dew
Shook from the pinions of the seraphim,
Breathe unaccepted music; the caress
Of childhood hath no bliss—its early words
And looks of marvel find no fellowship—
For the evil usages of life, that dwells
But in the glare and heat of midnight pomp,
Corrode, anneal and desecrate all love.
Yet some preserve the vivid thoughts—the charms
Of household sanctities; and one such now
Rose from affection's spotless couch and bent
O'er the angel face of virgin infancy;
And thus her gentle and blest thoughts found words.
“Thou sleep'st in Love's own heaven, my child! that brow
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No guilt hath darkened and no sorrow trenched:
Those lips, which from thy fragrant breath receive
The incense hues of thy sweet heart, no gust
Of uttered passion hath defiled; thy cheek
Glows with elysian health and holiness:
And all thy little frame seems thrilling now
In the pure visions of a soul sky born.
The Lares be around thee, oh, my child!
For never yearned Cybele over Jove
With transport deeper than is mine o'er thee!”
Then o'er her babe she spread the drapery,
Kissing the shut lids and unsullied brow,
Where the mind dreamed, perchance, of bliss foregone,
And shading with her byssus robe and flowers
The sunbeams from the sleeper, with a step
Soft as the antelope's, she stole and knelt
In prayer for that loved one at Vesta's shrine.
Breathing their bliss in melodies of love,
Their pictured wings fanning the ether, flew
The song birds, and the groves were full of mirth
Too pure for any voice but music's, when,
Lifting their dim eyes to the blaze of day,
Campania's proud patricians deemed the hour
So far removed from common time of rest,
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Without dishonor, they might breathe the breeze,
That o'er the dimpled waters and the flowers,
Since the first tints of dawn, had played like thought
Over the face of childhood—yet bore now
The vivid heat and dense effluviæ
Of culminating sun and marsh exhaled.
To mask the treacheries of eye and lip
Is pride's philosophy, the felon's skill,
The code of kings, the priesthood's mystic creed,
Unknown to accolytes; and none beheld,
Save the bronze lares, revel's quivering eye,
And dull brow bound with iron, or the face
Of matron guilt pallid with watch and waste,
And trembling in the faintness of a heart
Wrecked by excess of passion, yet again
Gasping for midnight poison! Untrimmed lamps,
Sculptured with shapes of ribaldry to lure (17)
Even satiety to sin's embrace,
To tempt the timid and inflame the inured,
Stood round the household altar, and upon
The silken couch of customary crime
Shed the pale, sickly light of vice o'erworn.
Oh that lascivious guilt at midnight wore
The lurid look, the loathing shame of morn!
Bracelets of gems, enchanted amulets,
-- 076 --
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And vases wrought with wanton images,
And frescoes, picturing the satyr joys
Of Jove and Hermes and the Laurel God,
(For the old divinities were human crimes)
And fountains, with nude naiads twining round
The unveiled tritons, and fair pedestals,
With groups of Paphians, in the forest dim,
(Where gloating forms lifted the filmy robes
Of the bacchantes in voluptuous sleep,)
Holding their revelries with gods disguised,
And every portraiture of pleasure known
To them, whose whole religion was excess,—
All in the chaos of the morning, flung
Alluring raptures over sated sense
And sickened passion, uttering, without voice,
“Ye buy Repentance at the price of hell!”
Loathing the fiend they folded to their hearts,
The madness and the malady of life,
The languor and the listlessness, that spring
From the exhaustion of a maniac lust,
The masters of the throng, in marble baths
And Araby's perfumes and cordial cups
Sought renovation for renewed delights.
Odors and thermal waters may restore
-- 077 --
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The maddening fever of the flesh, but earth
Hath nought to hush the muttering lips of guilt,
Or quell Death's agonies which guilt inflicts.
The Sybarite from Salmacis arose (18)
To consummate his orgies with fresh bliss,
But Lethe had no power o'er memories
Of broken vows and imprecating oaths
Made by the River of the Dead, what time
Cocytus moaned and Phlegethon upcast
Its lurid gleams o'er chasms of torrent gloom,
Bidding the banished reveller, who dared
To mock the Styx, roam by its blackened shores
Through the dark endlessness of shame and woe!
It was the Harvest Festival; the corn
Of Ceres filled the garners, and the vine
Of the Mirth-Maker from the winepress poured
Divine Falernian; and the autumnal feast,
The gathering of the fruits, to all the gods,
(Through the Earth-Mother and the King of Cups)
Was dedicated with a soul of joy.
In every temple the proud priesthood put
Their purple vestures and tiaras on
For the solemnities they loved to hold,
And masked the haughtiness of peerless power
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Beneath an austere aspect and a faith
That spared no violater of their laws.
Forth with the swell of trumpet and the voice
Of mellow flute and cithern, came the pomp
In all its grandest pageantry; the god
Of light gleaming on banners wrought with forms
Picturing theogenies or bridal rites,
Or earthly deeds of the divinities.
First walked Jove's pontiff in his diadem,
His crowned and sceptred standard fleckered o'er
With lightning bolts and tempest gloom, upborne
By popæ, weaponed for the sacrifice.
Then in the mazes of a wanton dance,
Lifting the thyrsus crowned with ivy wreaths,
And muttering banquet hymns, the priests of mirth
With antic faces and wild steps leapt on.
Next, with a golden ensign, vales and hills
Along its borders, filled with flocks and herds,
And tall sheaves in the centre, slowly trod
The ministers of Saturn's Daughter blest.
But, dimming all by splendor only known
In Egypt's voiceless mysteries, above
The long array now towered the gonfalon
Of Isis, glowing with devices shame
Shrunk to behold, the shapes of earth's worst sins—(19)
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Deified fiends! and with the lozel's smiles,
Her crowned pastophori, proud of their shame,
Waved round the ribald picture as they passed
The mansions of their votaries, and maids
And matrons hailed it from their porticoes.
Apollo from his eyes of ecstacy
And lips of bloom filling the bosomed air
With oracles; and Hermes, in the embrace
Of Iris, winging the blue heavens of love,
With his enchanted rod pointing to earth;
Vesta mid her Penates welcoming;
The heavenly Venus, with her starlight eyes,
Veiled brow and girded cestus, looking up
To the pure azure, spotless as her soul,
Followed by the more worshipped Cyprian queen,
So shadowed by her draperies that guilt
Revelled in beauty mocked with robes to tempt;
The war-god with the ancilia and the plumes (20)
Of gory fight, whose triumph was despair;
Proud Pallas with stern lips, and stainless brow,
Surmounted by its olive wreath, and eyes
That never quailed in their calm chastity;
Cotytto—the earth-passion's idol—mid
The unclothed Baptæ painted with designs
To startle e'en sear'd sense into a blush;
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The sea-king with his trident; the castout
And shapeless forger of the lightning bolts;
The deity of Erebus with her
He bore from Enna, and his son, the god
Of gold; Diana, in her treble forms,
Magician, huntress, virgin of the skies;
Hirsute and pranksy Pan, amid his fauns;
Nymphs, dryads, oreads and tritons;—all
The beautiful or dread or uncouth thoughts
The imagination made divinities,
In gorgeous chaos, to the Pantheon
Through Pompeii's streets thronged in their riot hour.
Behind the glittering crowd, the hecatomb
Of victims, led by golden cords, moved on.
To every god the sacrifice was meet;
The dove to Venus, and the bull to Mars;
To Dian, the proud stag—the lawless goat,
that tears the vine-leaves, to the deity
Of the gay banquet; and their horns, o'erlaid
With gold, tossed haughtily amid the crowd,
As, rolling their undreading eyeballs round,
They glared defiance and amazement, mute
Yet merciless when fit occasion came.
“An evil omen! lo! the victims strive,
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And we must drag them to the altar!” (21) said
The trembling augur—“what most dismal grief
And fatal destiny shall follow this?”
Yet onward surged the multitudes with boughs
Of olive in their hands and laurel crowns,
And Zeian barley spears folded in wreaths
By locks from richest fleeces, as they passed
The temple images, with practised skill,
Bending their foreheads on expanded palms.
And onward o'er the Appian Way the host
Of mitred, robed and bannered priests drew nigh
The fane of all the gods, and, at a word,
The music softened to a solemn strain,
The measured voices of the holy chiefs
Ascended in a song, and, as they ceased,
The people, like the ocean's myriad waves,
Raised their responses to the harvest prayer.
Wielder of Worlds that round Elysium dance
Beneath the brightness of thy sleepless eye,
Who from the bosom of the flame dost glance.
And feelst our time in thine Eternity!
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Thou deathless Jove!
Monarch of awe and Love!
Look from the radiant height of thy dominion
On thine adorers now,
And waft thy smile on Hermes' rainbow pinion,
And bend thine awful brow!
Immortal and supreme!
With vows and victims to thy shrine we come,
And hearts that breathe the incense of their praise,
And first fruits borne from each protected home,
To bless thee for the blessings of our days!
Have we not heard thy spirit in the dreams,
That glance o'er thought like morn's young light on streams?
In visions, watched thy bird of triumph near
The azure realms of thine ethereal sphere,
Waiting behests of victories and powers
And counsels from thy throne?
Hath not thy thunder voice, the summer showers,
The lightning spirit all thine own,
Bade strew the exulting earth with fruits and flowers?
Therefore, we render up
The spotless victim from the wood
And household field, and from libation cup
Pour the rich vine's unmingled blood.
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Accept our praise and prayer,
Sceptred Immortal of the chainless Air!
Chorus.—King of Elysium! hear, oh hear
From thine Olympian scat!
To priest and people bow thy sovereign ear!
We dare not see thy face, but kiss thy sacred feet!
God of the mornlight, when the orient glows
With thy triumphant smile, and ether feels
The Hours and Seasons, mid their clouds of rose,
Swept o'er its bosom on the living wheels
Of thy proud car,
When through the abysses of the heaven each star
Before the splendor of thy spirit fades
Like insect glimmerings in the noontide glades!
Hail, radiant Phœbus! lord
Of love and life, of wisdom, music, mirth,
At whose resistless word
Being and bliss dance o'er the blossomed earth!
O Pythian Victor, hear!
Pæonian healer of our ills, behold!
Breather of oracles! thy sons draw near
To feel the music of thy lyre unfold,
As shadows change before the morn to gold,
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The sealed-up volume of our darkened minds.
Breathe on Favonian winds,
And from the effluence of immortal light
Strew our dim thoughts with rays,
Till, sorrowing o'er this failing praise,
We know, with burning hearts, to sing thy deeds aright!
God of the harp and bow,
Whose thoughts are sunbeam arrows, hear!
Giver of flowers! dissolver of the snow!
Accept our gifts and let thy sons draw near!
Chorus.—Io Pæan! from thy sphere,
King of prophets, hear, oh hear!
From hallowed fount and hoary hill,
And haunt of song and sunlight near,
With inspirations come and every bosom fill!
Reveal the shrine! wave ye the laurel boughs,
Dipped in the fount that purifies the heart!
Unsullied Dian! breathe our holiest vows!
Storm-crowned Poseidon! to the imperial mart
Thou bearst the Median gems,
And loftiest Asian diadems,
And o'er thy billowy world we pour our praise!
Uranian Venus! let the Vesper rays
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Of thy beatitude around us float and dwell,
Till thine ethereal loveliness o'ercomes
The stains and shadows of thy mocker here,
And high the vine-god's song may swell
Among the shrines of Vesta's hallowed home
Without a following tear;
And Isis' mystic rites may thrill
The soul with Plato's most celestial vision,
And Pallas in her grandeur fill
The heart of Ceres with her mind elysian!
Blesser with bounty, hail!
What but thy gifts can mortals offer thee?
Smile on the banquet and the song and tale
The Dionysius breathes to thy divinity!
Hail, all ye gods of air, earth, wave and wind!
Ye oceans from the streams of human mind!
With spotless garments and unsandalled feet.
Purified bodies and undaring souls,
We the Pantheon tread! oh, meet,
Meet your adorers! lo! the incense rolls
Along Corinthian columns and wrought roof,
Like Manes wandering o'er the fields of bliss!
Chill not our worship with a stern reproof!
Hail, all ye gods! we worship with a kiss!
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Chorus —From shore and sea and vale and mountain,
Hail ye divinities of weal or woe!
Olympus, Ida, grotto, fountain,—
We in your Pantheon kneel—around your altars bow!
Thro' the bronze gates, sculptured with legends feigned
Of the theocrasies, the pageant swept,
A thousand feet dancing the song, and paused
Around the shrines they dragged the victims up.
Then bending from Jove's altar to the east,
The Pontiff raised the golden chalice, crowned
With wine unmingled, and, amid the shower (22)
Of green herbs, myrrh, obelia and vine leaves
Poured out the brimmed libation on the head
Of the awaiting sacrifice, from flocks
Chosen for beauty, and young quickening life.
Then with a laurel branch, he sprinkled all,
Circling the altar thrice; the heralds, then,
Cried, “Who is here?” and all the multitudes
Like billows answered deep, “Many and good!”
“Breathe not the words of omen!” “Lo! we stand
Like Harpocrates in the vestibule!”
The High Priest, mid the wreathing incense, raised
The prayer; the augur, with his wand, marked out
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The heavens; the aruspices, with eyes of awe
Behind the slayers of the sacrifice
Stood gazing on the victims. “Hath no spot,
No arrow from the Huntress' bow or dart
Of Pythius stained the offering?” said the priest.
“'Tis fair and perfect, and unblemished stands
To give its body to the Harvest Queen
And all the gods!—We pour into its ear
The holy water—yet it doth not nod!
We bend the neck—it struggles for the flight!
Dismal presages! omens of despair!”
The Pontiff quailed, not in the dread of gods,
(His sole divinity was his own power)
But fear of superstition's evil thought,
As from the fluctuating host arose
A smothered shriek of terror; and, in tones
Quick, stern, and deep as the exploded bolt,
Commanded “Strike! the wrath of Jove attends
The impious delay!” and, hushed as heaven
When broods the hurricane on cloudy deeps,
The worshippers stood trembling as they looked,—
The agonies and ecstasies of fear
And hope, in stormlike glimpses, shadowing o'er
The broken waves of faces—on the shrine,
And saw the axe of the cultrarius fall!
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Maddened and bleeding, yet not slain, the ram
Flung back his twisted horns—sent up a sound
Of anguish, and in phrenzy on the air
Springing, in his fierce death throes, fell amidst
Dismayed adorers and gasped out his life.
Shrieks o'er the panting silence rose and filled
The temple, and in horror shrunk the throng,
As o'er the accursed rites pale Nemesis,
Leading the Destinies, had come to blast
The sacrifice with sacrilege; but now
The Pontiff's voice, bidding his lictors quell
The tumult, called another victim up,
And stillness brooded o'er the stricken crowd.
Cashing the lifted neck, the popæ held
The brazen ewers beneath the bubbling blood,
And white-robed flamens bade the people note
The happiest augury—without a sigh
Or tremor, seen or heard, the victim died.
Then flayed and opened they the offering,
Lifting the vitals on their weapons' points.
With writhing brows, pale lips and ashen cheeks,
And failing hearts, in horror's panic voice,
The aruspices proclaimed the prodigies.
“The entrails palpitate—the liver's lobes
Are withered, and the heart hath shrivelled up!”
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Groans rose from living surges round; yet loud
The High Priest uttered—“Lay them on the fire!”
'Twas done; and wine and oil poured amply o'er,
And still the sacrificer wildly cried—
“Woe unto all! the wandering fires hiss up
Through the black vapors—lapping o'er the flesh
They burn not, but abandon! ashes fill
The temple, whirled upon the wind that waves
The flame through smothering clouds, towards the Mount,
That, since first light, hath hurled its lava forth!
Hark! the wild thunder bursts upon the right!
Ravens and vultures past us on the left!
Fly, votaries! from the wrath of heaven, oh fly!
The Vestals shriek, the sacred fire is dead!
The gods deny our prayers! fly to your homes!”
From the Pantheon struggled the vast throng,
And rushed dismayed unto their household hearths,
While from Vesuvius swelled a pyramid
Of smoke streaked o'er with gory flame, and sounds,
Like voices howling curses deep in earth,
From its abysses rose, and ashes fell
Through the thick panting air in burning clouds.
All save the haughty Pontiff, mocking fear,
Had flown the gorgeous Pantheon, but he sate
On the high altar, mid the trophied pomp
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Of priceless consecrations to the gods,
Breathing his scorn and imprecations on
The dastard people and the blasted rites,
When, heaving as on billows, while a moan
Passed o'er the statues, the proud temple swayed
As 'twere an evening cloud, from side to side,
Rocking beneath the earthquake that convulsed
Sea, shore and mountain, at its hollow voice,
Hurled into ruin; and his lips yet glowed
With execrations on the sacrifice,
When from its pedestal, bending with brow
Of vengeance and fixed lips that almost spake,
Jove's giant image fell and crushed to earth
The Thunderer's mocker in his temple home!
Like an earth-shadowing cypress, o'er the skies
Lifting its labyrinth of leaves, the boughs
Of molten brass, the giant trunk of flame,
The breath of the volcano's Titan heart
Hung in the heavens; and every maddened pulse
Of the vast mountain's earthquake bosom hurled
Its vengeance on the earth that gasped beneath.
Yet mortals, then, as now, deemed deities
The essence of men's passions—swayed like leaves,
By orison or chanted hymn, from deeds,
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Ere time had birth, appointed. So, within
Their secret chambers and the silent groves,
While Ruin's eye from the red living bolt
Glanced with a glare of scorn upon their rites,
The doomed idolaters, abashed yet fain
To win redemption from suspended wrath,
Round their Penates cowered, while magians came,
Sybils and sorcerers, to mock the mind
With mystic divinations, and reveal,
What prophets need not show, folly and guilt.
To avert the threated vengeance, Egypt's spells,
Muttered in sounds the utterer made not speech,
By magic incantations wrought, called up
Earth demons to unfold the future's deeds.
From the hill forest's gloom,
Where the lemures dwell;
From the depth of the tomb,
Whence the soul parts to hell;
From the dim caves of death
Where the coil'd serpent sleeps not,
And the lone deadly heath
Where the night spirit weeps not;
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From the shore where the wreck lies,
And the surge o'er the dead;
From the heart of the dark skies,
Where the tempest is bred;
Ye Demigods, hear!
Ye pale shadows, ascend!
And ye demons, appear!
To drink the bann'd cup ere the weird rites shall end!
From the ocean deeps come,
Where the coral groves glimmer,
In your trailed robes of gloom,
Making terror's face dimmer;
From the crag-pass of slaughter,
On the voiced air of death,
Come, shed o'er your daughter
Your oracle breath!
On the night vapor stealing
From the marsh o'er the mountain;
On the bland air revealing
No doom by the fountain;
Ye Demigods, come!
Ye pale shadows, ascend!
And ye demons, from gloom!
To drink the bann'd cup ere the weird rites shall end!
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Be ye blest or accursed,
Be ye famished or sated,
In pale Orcus the worst,
In Elysium the fated;
If ye roam by the shore
Which ye never may leave,
Or in nectar adore
Where ye never can grieve;
Be ye gross and malign
Or elysian as air—
Come forth and divine
What the future may bear!
Ye Demigods, come!
Ye pale shadows ascend!
And ye demons from gloom!
To drink the bann'd cup ere the weird rites shall end!
Amid the darkened necromantic haunts
Of worse fiends than the evoked, no voice replied.
Then, moulding effigies to suit her hate,
And dropping venom in each pictured pore,
The Sybil, with dishevelled serpent locks,
And Lamian features, bade the fiend of fire
Open the ritual of hell, and read
Revealings of the Destinies—and then,
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She drank from the bann'd skullcup poison draughts,
Pledging the damned! yet silence looked reply.
And each Promethean divination brought (23)
Nor shadow nor response; the mirrored glass
Returned no image; the drowned ring sent up
No echo; whirling gusts effaced the forms
Of letters writ in ashes; magic gems
No longer kept their power; the daphne burned
Without a sound; and every poison herb,
Though with unearthly skill distilled, no more,
Like Nessus' robe and wild Medea's gift,
Dispersed the agonies of maniac deaths.
Restless in doubt, the human mind hath sought
Knowledge in every hour of time, through tears,
Wasting and want and haggard solitude,
Anguish and madness; hovering o'er the verge
Of the cternal ocean, from whose depths
Earth's ghastly spectres rise to mock at hope,
The spirit follows through forbidden paths
The meteor of its own vain thought, till death
Shrouds, palls and sepulchres the throbbing dust.
Vain were petitions murmured to the gods
Priapus and Cunina to dissolve
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The spells of Fascinators; the evil eye
Of the Illyrian or Triballi sent
Its wonted glance into the trembling breast,
Possessing, as they feigned, the soul with fiends.
Vainly, they wore baccharis wreaths—in vain,
Their jasper, rhamn or laurel amulets
On brow or bosom hung! the magi dreamed.
Scorned thus by demon and by deity,
In guilt's delirium to Isis' shrine,
The multitude, beneath thick canopies,
As dreading the last hope of their despair,
Bear Pompeii's loveliest virgin (24)—in the bud
And perfume of her sinless being doomed
To perish in the vault of mysteries,
That evil men, by shedding guiltless blood,
May startle Fate to speak their doom! alas!
Must Death, from his pale realms of fear, so soon
Breathe on that beautiful and radiant brow
And leave it blasted? on the blossomed lips,
Whence music gushed in streams of rainbow thought,
And chill them into breathlessness and gloom?
That vermil cheek—those eyes, where thoughts repose,
Like clustered stars on the blue autumn skies,
That head of beauty and that heart of love—
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Oh, must they languish, moulder, and depart,
Without a sigh, from the sweet earth they loved?
When has the bigot, whatsoe'er his crown,(25)
Cidaris, mitre, oak or laurel wreath,
Spared, having power to torture? when, the slave
Of superstition slackened in his zeal
Of loving God by loathing humankind?
Weep with the crocodile—embrace the asp—
Doubt not the avalanche of ages—meet
The famished wolf's sardonic smile—and sleep
Beneath the upas—but believe not, man
E'er yet had mercy when his guilt feared hell!
With hurried footfalls o'er the lava walks (26)
And through the Forum's colonnades, unmarked
But by quick glances, to the Mount of Flame
Turning again, the worshippers passed on,
And the proud temple gates behind them closed.
Then from the altar of the idol came
The crowned hierophant, in robes o'erwrought
With mystic symbols, emblems of a power
Invisible, yet everywhere supreme,
As the air that shrouds the glaciers, and, like that,
Waked to annihilate, by one low voice.
Lifting his dusky hand, gleaming with gems,
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He waved the throng to worship, with hushed lips,
And, with a gesture, bidding neophytes
Come forth, and raise the victim, bound and stretched
On the Mosaic floor, in horror's arms,
With a hyæna step, through pillar'd aisles,
Dim, still and awful, to the vaulted crypt
Of gloom and most unhallowed sacrifice
He led the bearers of the victim maid.
One shuddering farewell—one shriek, that gave
A legion echoes, from her muffled lips
Gushed! then in gloom her hyacinthine hair
Vanished—and from the veiled recesses rose
The music of the sistrum, (27) and strange gleams
Of violet and crimson lights along
The shrine and statues flitted momently
And faded; and mysterious phantoms glanced
O'er the far skirting corridors, and left
The awed mind wildered with a doubting sense
Of silence broken by what was not sound,
Nor breathings of a living heart—nor tones
Of forest leaves nor lapses of the wind—
But a dread haunting of a sightless fear
Of unformed peril—a crushed thought, that through
The twilight dimness of the fane o'erhung
Gigantic beings of diluvian realms,
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Voiceless and viewless, yet endowed with might
To rend the mortal breather of a sigh!
Down the chill, dusky granite steps the priest
Guided the virgin sacrifice; above,
The massy and barr'd vault door shut; and night,
Shown in its ghastly terrors by wild rays
Of many tinctured lights, fell on the heart
Of the devoted, desolated maid.
Through still descending labyrinths, where coiled
All loathsome creatures, and dark waters dripped
With a deep sullen sound like pulses heard
By captives dying in their dungeon tomb,
The Egyptian glided hurriedly and still.
Then o'er a green lagoon, whose festered flood
Flung back a deathsome glare as the lights sunk
Upon its sleeping surface stretching far
Into the floating masses of the gloom,
They, in a mouldered barque, went silently.
The plated crocodile, on the earth and pool
Suspended, ope'd his sluggish jaws and looked
Upon the priest with fawning earnestness;
He gazed upon the victim and passed by,
And the loathed reptile dreamed of coming feasts.
Rugged and spiral grew the pathway; bats,
Waving the spectre lights, winged through the vaults,
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Startled yet welcoming; and serpents lanced
Their quivering tongues of venom forth and hissed
Their salutations; and the lizards crept
Along the cold, wet ridges of the caves;
And oft the maiden's agonizing eyes
Beheld in niches or sarcophagi
Mortality's abhorred resemblances,
With folded serpents sculptured overhead;
And oft the feet of the familiars struck
Strewn relics of the victims offered here!
Winding through tangled passages—her brain
O'erfraught with the still horror—for no sound
Lived through the endless caverns—thought and sense
Of being fled from the doomed maiden's heart,
Time, mystery and darkness and lone death
Passed from the trances of her brain, and earth
And agony and wrong and violence
Were but the shadows childhood sports withal!
She woke amid the gush and hymning voice
Of fountains and the living gleam of fires,
And swell of tenderest music; and beside
The purple couch of luxury, whereon,
Free from all bonds save chains of jewelled gold,
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In a vast chamber, hung with flowers and gems,
She lay, the priest of Isis stood;—his eye
No longer stern and chill, his lips no more
Like sculptured cruelty, but bright and warm
And moist with mellowest wine; and o'er his face,
Late masked in mockeries, the burning light
Of Passion broke, as thus, with wanton smiles,
He breathed his heart upon his victim's ear.
“Thy path to pleasure, like the world's, my love!
Was through the empire of pale doubt and pain,
Where many visions of detested things
Will consummate in rapture deigned thee here.
And didst thou think, my queen of loveliness!
That by the dastard crowd of Pompeii
Thou wert borne hither that the sacred lips
Of Isis, parted by thy purest blood,
Might give responses to fiend-loving fools?
The goddess hath a voice—when I ordain,
And, when her mysteries have filled their hearts
With myriad terrors to which death is bliss,
They shall not lack an answer to their quest.
But this is Love's elysium; men may seek
Another by Jove's grace—but this for me!
Be their's eternities of prayer and hymn!
But Time and wine and Venus are my gods!”
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“Holy Diana! hath thine Iris (28) come
To lead me through elysium's myrtle groves?
Thanks for the briefest pangs of death! my soul
Blends with the radiance, songs and incense here
In rapture, unforgetting earth's dark ills,
The victim bonds, gloom, terror, madness borne
Amid the vaulted corridors—deep thanks,
Chaste Dian! for the dart that winged me here!”
Thus she lay whispering faintly while the veins
Again like violets began to glow
And Thought from the elysian portals turned
To shed, once more, its starlight o'er her brow.
The lips, like rifted sunset clouds, burned o'er
With beauty, and the sloe-dark eyes, from lids
Of loveliness o'erarched like rainbows, flashed
Upon the luxuries of wantonness
With a delirious brightness; and she pressed
Her Peri hand upon her troubled brain
As dismal memories through all the pomp
Around her thronged. “Do visions o'er me rush
Through the ivory gate? or what is this? methinks
The limbs of Vesta pass not Charon's ward—
Yet bear I them! and I behold no forms
Like the supreme divinities who dwell
Beyond the azure curtains of the skies!”
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“Look on thy suppliant worshipper, my love!
Thy Saturn, my Osiris, aptly feigned,
With Horus and the laughing boy-god, wreathed
With lotus and charm'd myrtle, must be now
The only Guardians of our paradise—
For thou art the voluptuous Paphian Queen,
And must with kisses be adored! thy breath
Is odor—on that fair full bosom sleep
A thousand loves—those lustrous eyes enchant—
And the limbs moulded by divinest skill”—
“Reveal thy speech! what import bear these words?
Dream I, or art thou the hierophant
Of Isis, who from Mizraim's pyramids
Broughtst new gods into Latium? I must err,
For thou wearst not the countenance that chilled
My soul, and tyrannized o'er Pompeii's crowd,
But rather, like earth's faun or satyr fiend,
Gloatest o'er some revenge for sin unknown!”
The maiden's lost mind came in all its strength
And purity, and in the dreadless might
Of thoughts unsoiled by evil, she resolved
To match unfriended virtue with the power
Of Passion in religion's mask beyond
The Law's arraignment or the avenger's wrath.
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“Simple as Pyrrha when the shattered barque
Of hoar Deucalion landed from the foam!”
With blandishments, said Isis' haughty priest.
“Knowst thou not, loveliest! that holy men
Must never shame their gods by deeds unlike
Their sacred exploits? what were deathlessness
Without delight? eternity, without
The ecstasies of woman's winning smile?
Thy country's hoarest fathers, most for skill
In council, and unequalled virtue famed,
In canon and enactment of old law,
Did consecrate corruption and commit
Captives to bondage of their tyrant's will,
And build proud temples for the haunt of shame
Being but mimes of the Immortals, then,
As countless births, revered as prodigies,
And chained Prometheus, shunning their gift,
To meet their wrath, and mad Lycaon driven
Into the wild, can testify in tears.
Why, then, should the weak waiter on the rites
Of the Omnipotents refrain from joy?
Folly must feel his masterdom, when words,
Called oracles, are bought, but, in all else,
The priest was framed for pleasure—and thy smile,
Hebe of Beauty! from thy vassal here
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Shall win a better augury than all
Campania's hecatombs!—time wastes, my bliss!
Speak thou the oracle I shall repeat
Through Isis' marble lips! the answer's thine!”
“Thus be the answer, then, “Ye seek my shrine
To know the Future and the will of heaven—
The Past reveals both!” or, if this suit not
The goddess who doth fold her tissued words
So Passion may unravel good or ill,
Thus let the mystic oracle declare:
“Ye shall pass o'er the Tyrrhene sea in ships
Laden with virgins, gems and gods, and spoils
Of a dismembered empire, and a cloud
Of light shall radiate your ocean path!”
Breathes not the soul of mystery in this? (29)
“Ay, love! and after his desire or hope
Each may interpret—veriest oracles
Must have a myriad meanings—and the voice
Of Memphian Isis shall, at once, respond
To the denied apostates; then, my life!
While dotards live on riddles and embrace
Shadows as did the Thunderer what time
The ox-eyed empress jealoused of his deeds.
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We at Love's heavenly banquet shall repose
And drink the ecstacies of mingled hearts!
--The sistrum sounds! the sculptured lips shall speak!”
Exulting thus, the idol minister,
Pressing the bosom of great Serapis,
Whose statue by a Doric pillar stood,
Disclosed a stairway guiding through the shaft
Unto the altar of the fane, and thence
Within the hollow image, from whose mouth
Responses breathed that fitted any deed
Or æra; fable was religion's name.
Up through the open bosom of the God,
Saying, (30) “The mocker Momus has his jest
And more, since e'en the Immortal's breast bears now
A mirror”—passed the priest--and soundlessly
The dædal portal, bossed with vine-wreaths, closed.
That moment, from the flowered and purple couch
The maiden sprung, through any caverned path,—
All peril and loathed sights and awful sounds,
To fly from pomp, pollution and despair.
Bounding along the tesselated floor,
She passed the beds of banquet, whose perfume
From sightless vases stole, and gained the verge
Of the vast gleaming hall—she met the waves
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Of black and silent depths that seemed to scowl
On her vain flight! to every side she flew
But to encounter granite battlements,
Coiled serpents, clustered sepulchres, cold cliffs,
Gigantic sphynxes, towering grim o'er lakes
Of sulphur, or the dreadful shapes of fiends.
The gorgeous lights grew shadowy, and stained clouds
Of vapor floated o'er the pillared roof,
Taking all forms of terror; and low sighs
And muttered dirges from the waters stole
Along the arches; and through all the vaults,
Into a thousand wailing echoes rent,
A shriek, loud, quick and full of agonies,
Burst from the deep foundations of the fane.
With steps like earliest childhood's, to her couch
The maiden faltered back, and there, with soul
Too overfraught for wished unconsciousness,
Gasping her breath, she listened! Sullen sounds
Wandered along the temple aisles above;
Then came the clang of cymbals and strange words
Uttered amid the far-off music's swell:
And the prostrated multitudes, like woods
Hung with the leaves of autumn, stirred; then fell
A silence when the heart was heard—a pause—
When ardent hope became an agony;
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And parted lips and panting pulses—eyes
Wild with their watchings, brows with beaded dews
Of expectation chilled and fevered—all
The shaken and half lifted frame—declared
The moment of the oracle had come!
A sceptre to the hand of Isis leapt
And waved; and then the deep voice of the priest
Uttered the maiden's answer, and the fall
Of many quickened steps like whispers pass'd
Along the columned aisles and vestibule.
None deemed, the maiden in the earthquake's groan
And the volcano's thunder voice had heard
The hastening doom, and clothed it in dark words,
The blinded victims never could discern;
But to the bosom of their guilt again
They passed, dreaming of victories and spoils!
“Gone!” said the priest, descending—“Serapis!
Pardon and thanks I crave and give thee, God!
—Gone to their phantom banquet with glad hearts—
Such is the bliss of superstition's creed!
And they will glory o'er their fellows now,
Deeming themselves the temples of the gods!
Brimmed with revealings of divinity!
But Folly wafts us food, and we should laud
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The victim of night visionries who parts
With virgin gold for fabled miracles!
But that thy loveliness might peril prayers
And change the rites to riots ill esteemed,
Thou shouldst have been a pythoness, my love!
What shadow veils thy vestal brow? thou art
My bride, and pleasure waits upon thee here—
Let the pure wine awake thy thoughts to mirth!”
“Mirth at the altar which thou mockst with jeers!
Mirth in thy holy ministries, proud priest!
It fits thee not—and less thine evil speech
To Lælius' child, who, while her father waits
On royal Titus in imperial Rome,
Betrayed, it seems, by thy fit parasites,
Was hither borne by Pompeii's maddened throng,
Whom thy vile minions goaded to the deed,
A victim, not to Isis, but to thee!
Beware, thou atheist pontiff! the shocked world
Hath had and shall, through uncreated time,
Have mitred scorners, who blaspheme the heavens,
Mocking the faith with which they manacle
The hearts that would deny yet dare not—like
Thee, mocker of the idol thou dost serve!
Yet doubt not—years are but the viewless path
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Of the avenging Deity! the earth,
Elysium, Orcus, the sweet pleiades,
The weeping stars, the depths of ocean swept
By typhon tossing billows to the heavens—
All live but in the breath of one Supreme,
Whose heart inspires the universe—whose soul
Is Immortality! and 'neath His throne
I kneel and wrap around my mortal fears
The robe of His immortal purity,
Bidding thee, Priest! e'en in thy purple home,
Tremble amid thy thoughts of sacrilege!”
“Io Athena! Pallas hath no gift
To rival thine, my loveliest! thy words,
Like pungent herbs before the banquet, give
A charm, a flavor, an Apician zest
To the deferred delight that dawns in tears.
Coy maidenhood! the sage in all his lore
Must learn the science of awaking bliss
From thee, supremely skilled in scorpion taunt
And torture, which prelude long lingering bliss.
But the wine blushes, Love! to meet thy lip—
Lo! how it kisses the crowned cup and smiles!
Thou wouldst not leave me—though thy free discourse
Argues but ill—for yon dim vaults, greened o'er
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-- 111 --
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A glad sound on mine ear—a triumph sound—
The deep earth-hymn of ruin! hark! it swirls
Along the abysses of the hills and seas,
Lifting the mountains with its breath—it comes!
Ye manes of mine ancestors! it comes!”
“What, scorner! dost thou think to cheat my skill
With thy Trophonian dreams, when I have clasped
Delusions to my bosom since my birth?
And juggled faith by all circean arts?
I woo no longer! thou art in my grasp—
And by the Immortals I contemn! thou shalt”—
“It comes! the temple reels and crashes—Jove!
I thank thee! Vesta! let me sleep with thee!”
And on the bosom of the earthquake rocked
The statues and the pillars, and her brain
Whirled with the earth's convulsions, as the maid
Fell by a trembling image and upraised
A prayer of gratitude; while through the vaults,
In fear and ghastly horror, fled the priest,
Breathing quick curses mid his warning cries
For succor; and the obscene birds their wings
Flapped o'er his pallid face, and reptiles twined
In folds of knotted venom round his feet.
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Through the felt darkness of the labyrinth.
On sculptured capitals and heads of gods
She passed the dismal waves, and trident tongues
Hissed after her amid the turbid foam.
She passed the beamless corridors and fled
Along a gorgeous banquet hall, o'erstrewn
With porphyry tables, alabaster lamps,
Half quenched, and shattered wine cups of gemm'd gold.
She grasped a flickering altar-light and on
Hurried, casting on dolesome objects round,
And nameless things of horror, glances wild
With terror and deep loathing; the death-dews
Upon the walls, green with the deadly moss,
Trailed in thick streams, and o'er her sinking heart
Breathed the cold midnight of the sepulchre;
And from the shapeless shadows growing up,
The startled spirit wrought the forms of fiends,
Or, worse, pursuers charged to hale her back.
The virgin flies along a corridor
Ampler, and living with the daylight air;
And far, upon its boundary, she discerns
An open portal, and a rosebeam gush
Of radiance streams upon the threshold stone.
Like Delphi's Pythia in her maniac mood,
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And one with woman's weakness; as she gazed,
The vanished blood, grief, shame and failing power
Had driven to the fainting heart, came back,
And, with a quick renewal of lost hope,
Casting the other, who with palsied thought
Gazed on the fearful visitor, aside,
The feebler being rushed along the aisles,
With ashen face and raiment soiled and torn.
The maiden traced the fugitive, and ere
The blood, now at the heart, might reach the brow,
They stood together 'neath the open skies.
“The Savior for thy service bless thee, maid!”
'Twas Mariamne—from the loathed embrace
Of Diomede escaped—that quickly spake.
“I cannot ask nor answer now—but fly
With me, for peril's look proclaims thee pure!
Quick, maiden! Diomede will never spare—
Yet Mariamne once again is free!
It should be noontide; but a livid gloom
Palls all things, and a ghastliness, nor beam
Nor blackness, wraps our flight and bodes an eve
The workers of all evil, in their pride,
Nor dread nor dream of! Pansa! heaven in love
Keep thy unflatering thoughts beneath the wings
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Of cherubim, and clothe thy heart with strength
To foil the fiend that dares or tempts to sin—
Where'er thou art!—we shall not fail to meet,
For all shall be abroad, and earth and skies
And waters shall commingle ere sun sinks.
Away! sweet maiden!—now the Cyprian's fane—
The equestrian Forum—the Prætorians' tower—
Are passed; and mid the crowded huts, that lie
Beneath the amphitheatre, we rest
Till the deep justice of Jehovah comes!”
“Art thou a Heretic?” the maiden said.
“I was a Hebrew and a princess—now
I am a Christian and a captive! come—
This garb and guise of thine declare, methinks,
Some mysteries of thy country's deities—
This day, thou shalt not fail to learn of mine!”
She breathed a strange word and a shrivelled hand
Unbarred a low dark postern, and a face,
Darkened and harrowed by the toils and thoughts
And changes of exceeding years, looked forth.
The melancholy shadow of a smile
And the sad echo of a broken voice
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Gave welcome to the wanderers; and amid
The solemn stillness of their refuge fell
From the pale lips of persecuted faith
Full many a history of the martyrdoms.
The games of life go on! Madness and mirth,
Triumph and tears, the holydays of youth,
The apathy of stricken age, the pride
Of intellect and prostrated purposes,
Rapture and anguish, poverty and pomp,
And glory and the tomb—like rivals, crowd
Along the isthmus of our being, doomed
To vanish momently in billowy gloom!
The dewlight of the morn in storm departs;
The moonbeams strewing rifted clouds, like smiles
Breathed from the bosom of Divinity,
Sink ere the daybeam in the tempest's rack;
Yet on o'er buried centuries—the dead dust
Of ages—once like the starred heavens inspired
By myriad passions, dreaming miracles,
And winged conceptions infinite as air—
Time, the triumpher, in his trophied car,
Moves sternly, trampling ardent hearts to earth.
Oh, diademed Hypocrisies! budding Bliss,
The mildew sears—sky-soaring Hope, that dies
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In its birth moment—Love, which on its shrine
Of incense perishes—and Fame, that drinks
The bane of human breath and falls alone!
The same arena, judges, wrestlers, crown—
The same brief transport and unsolaced doom—
First, madness, and then vanity—the world
Must be, till time is quenched, what it hath been,
The bounded circle of chained thought, trod down
By nations hastening into nothingness,
Echoing the groans of Pain's ten thousand years,
And drenched by tears that find no comforter!
With livid clouds of ashes, lava hail,
And furnace cinders all the air was filled;
And through the bosom of Vesuvius passed
Groans as of earth-gods in their endless death,
And giant writhings, crushing the earth's heart;
And through the tossing vapors, mingling flame
And cavern gloom, toward the Evening Isles
So loved by ancient sage and patriot bard,
From the passed zenith rolled the gory sun.
Like the ailanthus tree of old Cathay,
Whose boughs, hoar legends say, bloom in the stars,
The deep smoke of o'erhanging ruin whirled
From the volcano's pinnacle, and flung
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Its branches over nations, scattering death.
The Appenines, looking the wild wrath and awe
Their woods and precipices took, upraised
Their brows of terror and magnificence,
On their eternal thrones watching the throes
Of the convulsed abysses; from the crags
The seared and shivering forests bent and moaned,
As o'er them flew the torrid blast of fate;
And, as the molten rocks and mines began
To pour their broad deep masses from the height,
Vast trunks of cypress and of cedar stood
Charred, stark and trembling, and the castelled cliffs
Burst like a myriad thunders, while the flood
Of desolation, o'er their crashing wrecks,
Tow'rd Herculaneum, gleaming horror, rolled.
Yet men repented not of foregone crime,
Denied them not their wonted festivals,
Their pomp of garniture and banquet mirth.
Tornado, pestilence, earthquake and war,
Awe not the criminal inured to guilt;
So the barbed poison arrow flies his heart,
His pageants and night orgies brighter glow—
Though death sighs float along the wine cups brimmed
With nectar mocking all calamities.
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From the Basilicæ the Prætor passed,
(Thither, when foiled in lust, to wreak his wrath
On guiltlessness and guilt alike, he went)
Leaving his tyrant judgments, in a voice
Of jeering merriment pronounced, to fall
On less offending breakers of the law.
Prostrate upon his path, a mother cried,
“Spare, O Proconsul! spare my guiltless child!
He walked not with conspirators—spake not
To leaders of sedition—spare him, judge!
He hath no father—and is all to me!”
“The hordes of Hæmus may learn wisdom, then,
And virtue and refinement from his speech—
For he is banished—I reverse no doom!”
The lictors' fasces o'er the supplicant
In haughty scorn went on. Another voice
Assailed the Prætor: “To a cruel lord
The quæstor sold my husband for the tax
Ye laid upon our thatched hut—and he groans
In bondage, while his famished children die!”
“Why am I thus benetted on my way?
I serve the senate and inflict their laws.
What is't to me who thralls or suffers thrall?
Let him atone! Why should he scorn to toil?'
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“Justice, Lord Governor!” a third implored.
“Thy favorite Vibius hath cast deep shame
Upon my household and my daughter's wrongs
Exact redress; not more than this from Rome
Banished the Tarquins and decemviri!”
“Ha! dost thou threat, Plebeian? Vibius hears
Thy fierce arraignment with a smile—no doubt,
Some twilight kisses in the summer glade—
Pressed palms—clasped bosoms—dewy lips—no more!
And thou wouldst mock the majesty of law,
And wed thy base condition with the blood
Of my Patrician friend! away with thee!
Methinks, Vesuvian fume hath filled the brains
Of all the city—and the boiling earth
Bubbled its yeast into your grovelling hearts.
On, Lictors! on—we tarry from the feast!”
In robes of white, festooned by mingled flowers,
And ivy wreaths or crowns of amethyst,
The Prætor's guests, on crimson couches, lay
Around the ivory tables, on which stood
A silver shrine and images of gods.
Pictures—the prodigies of perfect skill—
Hung round the hall of banquet, and to men.
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The imitators of divinities,
Made venial every vice. In plenitude
Of power and treachery, their holiest Jove,
Masked to dishonor and betray, achieved
Shame's triumphs, and the wanton canvass lived
With Mycon's impure thought (31); there Bacchus stood,
Gloating o'er lozelries and revel routs,
As Zeuxis drew the king of catamites;
Venus, the earth-born, mid voluptuous nymphs,
Reclined on myrtle beds with swimming eyes,
And sunbeam lips with morn dews moist, and swell
Of bosom far too beautiful, and limbs
Wantoning mid flowers, that veiled them not! and fame
For matchless charm of genius here had shrined
Parrhasius' name! and Passion's maddening heart
Burned o'er the walls, and rival statues stood
Beneath; and there the last wild feast was held
That e'er was bought by Pompeii's toil and tears.
The kneeling slaves in goblets wrought from gems
Served acrid wine—on gold plate, bitter herbs
To zest the appetite; and, glancing up
His haughty eyes, burning with hate and scorn,
Chafed Diomede upon his vassals flung
The venom of his darkly brooding mind.
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“Be thy locks shorn as fits thine office, slave!
Or I may brand the theta on thy brow (32)
Less undefined, and make the dust thy food!
Campanian servitude, methinks, outgrows
All wantonness;—and, Midas! thou art skilled,
I hear in tintinnaculating verse,
And lispest snatches of philosophy!
Be master of thy safety! I may lose
A pampered slave ere long—or, at the best,
The tintinnaculus may shame thy clink! (33)
—Be merry, friends!—what tidings from the throne?
Ye have beheld the Temple of the Peace
Filled with the spoils of rebel Jews, where all
Treasure their gold and gems—a trophied fane!
The gorgeous fabric is a coffer! Rome,
The mistress of earth's glories and delights,
Hath few rings now e'en on patrician hands.
What think ye, then? a sackcloth skeleton
Wanders and mutters on the Palatine
That what he calls Jehovah's wrath will burst,
And in thick blackness bury all this pomp,—
Making Earth's Mistress a stark mendicant!”
Loud laughed the parasites, and wanton gibes
Were cast on Jew and Gentile; then the feast
Of rarest luxuries before them glowed,
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And, (bright libations poured to Vesta first)
The beaded wine was quaffed from goblets brimm'd.
“Oh, I forget!” said Diomede, the light
Of the delirious revel in his eyes,
As in the opal radiance of the cup
They glowed, and glanced, with an exulting pride,
Midst costliest viands from the mead and main—
“The fairest sport awaits us ere the games!
In the Campanian legion at the siege
Of that black Golgotha the traitors called
Jerusalem, a soldier served with skill
Whom Titus made decurion: him the plague
Of the new Heresy and Love, at once,
Infected; and, abandoning the host,
He sought elysium in the caverns here,
Till Thraso found his philosophic haunt,
Where with his Hebrew Paphian he was wont
In hermit guise to play the liberal.
He dies to-day; but for the present mirth
His tongue may vibrate.—Ho!—The Nazarene!”
The slaves led Pansa from the portico
Fettered yet fearless, for the time of dread
Had passed from him, and in his hopeless cell
The Paraclete had shadowed o'er his soul
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And panoplied his heart to dare his doom.
Thus, as he entered, loud the Prætor spake.
“Hail, Gladiator! did thy felon god,
Thy scourged and crucified divinity
Instruct thee in the sabre's use against
The shaggy monarch of Numidian hills?
Art thou argute and apt to lunge and fence,
Adroit and firm of nerve to meet or shun
The tusked embrace of the heroic king?
Lucania and Calabria have poured out
Their thousands to behold thy feats to-day;
And, gay as bridal banquetters, they throng
The arcades and the vomitories now
To weep the Mauretanian's martyrdom—
For thou, no doubt, wilt triumph and receive
The twice ten thousand acclamations sent
To honor thy proud valor, as is meet.
Oh, thou shalt be anointed like thy Christ,
And not with vulgar nard by courtesans,
But ceroma and myron! owest thou not
Thanks to the Roman mercy for this care?”
“A Roman's Mercy! every spot of earth
Your banners have shed plagues on, can attest
With shrieks what mercy Rome has given earth.
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Yet ye shall never feel the love ye boast
Until the slaves ye trample, rack and slay,
After the unanswered vengeance of your will,
Shall learn that they are human and awake
To imitate the mercy of their lords!
Perchance—'twas in thy native land—I know
Thee and thy fathers, Prætor! though thou sitst
In pride of judgment now—thine ancestors
Were suttlers of the Carthagenian camp,
When mine called freedom to the sacred Mount;
Thou mayst have heard the tale of Sicily,
Or read that Spartacus withstood the hosts—”
“Ay, traitor and apostate! ere an hour
To gnash thy perjured tongue!” said Diomede,
Dreading his victim's speech, for he had lived
In terror of the knowledge of his birth,
Yet foaming curses. “Ay, a million died
“In fit atonement of their rebel crime?”
“Crime? that the name of Liberty should be
The burning heart's perpetuated curse!
Oh, what can thrive in thraldom but revenge?
The thong, the goad, the brand of shame—the sense
Of ignominy, dreading to uplift
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Its startled eye—what should they bring? and what
Must be the fruits of such a poison tree?
Condition is but chance, and none are born
With manacles upon their limbs! most crimes
Corrupted power makes such, and men submit
Because their vital veins have wrapt the chain.”
“Now by the sceptred Three who rule the shades!
Can his own heretics arraign his doom?
Such uttered doctrines would convulse the world,
And even here shall not be spoken—cease!
Thou cursed Christian! wouldst thou rouse my slaves?”
“No realm of earth is slavery's—I would bid
The dust be spirit, and the brute be man!
I came not hither by my will—I am
Thy victim, not thy vassal—and if Truth
Offends, command thy serfs to bear me hence!
But here—and in the arena—thought and speech
Are mine; and from my country and my faith
I have not failed to learn the rights of man!
From the far hour when vestal Ilia sinned
And suffered, and Rome's walls were laid in blood,
Have human hearts had peace, whether among
Helvetian icehills or the Lybian wastes?
Conquest was born of carnage and the spoil
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Of kingdoms to a hydra faction given,
While sybilline revealments—Numa's thoughts—
With old religion sanctified the deeds
Of desolaters of the shuddering earth.
Scarce e'en for hours through all Rome's centuries
Hath the caduceus met the eye of day, (34)
Or the ancilia idle in the fane
Of the fiend-god, whose herald is despair,
Hung: but far gleaming in the torrid sun
Mid standards floating to the winds of heaven,
On all the earth have cast the plagues of hell.
Boundless, perpetual and almighty Fear
Hath ever been your God of gods—rocks, caves,
Woods, grottoes, lakes and mountains are the realms
Of Dis of Jupiter's elysian fields.
And wisely named the sophist and the bard
The floods of fabled Erebus—for Rome
Baptized her sons in Phlegethons of blood,
Cheering war vigils with Cocyti songs.
Yon, by the Tyrrhene waters, on whose shores
The banished Scipio died in solitude;
The tyrant raised his hundred banquet halls, (35)
Tritoli's stews and Baiæ's palaces;
The cannibal patrician daily slew
Captives to feed the lampreys of his lake—:
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And Rome's all-daring Orator, proscribed
By princely friendship in his peril, 'neath
Antony's vengeance fell, a martyr—; there,
The astute creators of your creed have feigned
Your mortal hell and heaven—in Comæ's caves,—
(Where dwelt Deiphobe, as in the wilds
That skirt the Erythraean, tasking faith,
Heirophila abode and muttered spells—)
And Puteoli's naptha mines—amid
The beautiful Pausylipo, whose waves
And woods in sweet airs and fair suns rejoice;
And maniac yells of gorgon sybils are
Elysium oracles, and Zephyr's voice
The music of the blest; and loftiest minds
Worship in show impostures they disdain,
The phantoms of the fashion, that their spoil
May be the richest booty.—What reck they,
The masters of men's minds, who guides the spheres?
A myriad gods or none to them are one,
For all are nothing but fear's phantasies.
Sinnis or Sciron less obeyed earth's laws
Than they the edicts of almighty Jove.
The proud Alóides taught the souls of such—
They would quench heaven to win the fame of earth.
The all-believing, as their priests ordain,
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Adore their fiend god through his daughter.—Sin.
Ye know not Truth in fealty or faith—
And seas of lustral waters could not cleanse
Your tear stained and blood sprinkled robes of guilt!”
“By Hercules, the earth-cleaver! thy bold speech,
Decurion once and devil caster now!
Forebodes disaster to my king of beasts!”
Said Diomede, beneath a mocking scorn
Veiling the wrath he could not quell nor speak.
“Am I the patron of thy sole renown?
And doth thy creed teach viper thanklessness?
I do immortalize thy robber skill
Learned in meet skirmishes with vulture flocks
And hordes of wolves to win the dead man's gold,
And in Apollo's image to the knights
Of Latium and Apulia thee present.
Thou art a lion-darer, and needst not
The famed Lanista's discipline to lift
The wood-king's heart upon thy sabre point,
For thou hast learned the sleight of fence, no fear,
From Galilean trainers, and hast wrought,
In thy maraudings, miracles of skill!
Rejoice in thine ovation, Nazarene!
Thou art the Sylla of the games to-day.
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The Samnite mock-fight and the chariot race,
Myrmillo and the Gaul, the net and mail—
All shall give place to thee and Nubia's beast.
And while thy glory soars, sweet Venus wraps
Her arms around thy love, and sunset melts
On the pavilion of her soft delight,
Where she doth wanton in Love's revelries,
And kisses from her roselight lips reward
My service in the honor of thy name,
And fair flowers fan the glowing cheek of bliss!”—
“Mock on, blood drinker! Mariamne mocks
Thee and thy wanton minions, whereso'er
Beneath the Orcus of your power she dwells.
Seek not through her dominion o'er my heart!
She hears a voice sweeter than Memnon's, feigned
To breathe daybreak farewells when o'er the blue
Of lustrous morn Aurora's gemlight fled;
She feels the viewless presence of her God—
Earth has no power upon her stainless soul!
Therefore, again, I tell thee Rome shall wail
For all her havocs, treasons, spoils and plagues.
Oh, every empire of her vast domains
Hath its aceldama, where voices howl
Anathemas the future shall fulfil.
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All power is venal through her fated realms.
The rebel's Rubicon o'ersweeps the land,
And all its waves are blood! proscription's code.
Taught by the triumvir, is the only law
Left by unanswering Cæsar unannulled.
How many ages with their agonies
Have perished since the people had a choice
Of their oppressors? What's the ordeal, now,
Censors and consuls must endure? and where
The simple wreath that stories tested deeds?
All the sweet shadowings of old phantasie,
The enchantments of religion, false and vain,
But glowing, in its earliest dreams, with love—
Arion and the dolphin, Orpheus,
And hymning groves, and awful Dis defied
By passion in bereavement, daring death,
The Sungod's pæans o'er the Cyclades,
The charmed illusions of the Blessed Isles,
The mystery and rapture of high thought,
That from the sacred porticoes and banks
Of beautiful Ilissus poured its light
O'er Tyber and the haunts of Tusculum—
All, now, have vanished—and the powers of air,
Your fathers deemed their witnesses, receive
From atheist scoffers of the time defiled
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Derision; and emasculated vice
Gloats over memories e'en Pan might loathe.
—Breathe not a hope that vengeance will forget!
A darker doom, than his whose savage eyes
Glared from the marshes of Minturnæ (36)—comes;
A destiny more terrible than his
Who died blaspheming in corruption's arms,
Shameless in shame, at Puteoli—lours!
The voice of judgment hath pronounced on sin
Extinction—and the Avengers are abroad!
From the Ister and the Rha, the storm-lashed shores
Of the Codanus and Verginian sea—
From glacier steep and torrid crag—from vale
And wilderness—city and waste—shall rush
Devourers; and a thousand years shall weep
In darkness o'er her desolated pomp,
And thousand times ten thousand vassal hearts
Live without love and die without regret,
Boasting their bondage, and in titles won
By pandering to an earth-fiend's lust, exult,
And call their shame patrician privilege!
The Goth hath trod the citadel; the Gaul,
The Scythian and the Vandal and the Hun
Shall reap the harvest of her ruin! Time
Wafts on the terrible revenge—the doom
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Challenged by centuries of guilt!—I hear
The tocsin and the gong—the clarion blast,
The roar of savage millions in their wrath—
Barbarian yells like billows broke by rocks—
And where the splendor of the imperial reign
Floats now—I see a hoary head o'ercrowned (38)
By the three diadems of earth, hell, heaven—
And the bright land of plenty trod by bands
Of bandits, famished peasants, coward chiefs—
All of Rome buried save the tyranny!”
“Oh, thou with the Cumæan prophetess
Hast hiddenly consorted and pored on
The almagest of Ptolemy till stars
And meteors have become the ministers
Of thy distempered fashionings of fate!”
Sardonic smiles o'er revel's swollen lips
Passed slowly, and the Prætor's jest had now
E'en from the venal sycophants small praise;
For crime in common natures, once unveiled,
Startles the practiser, and fear becomes
His hell, o'ermastering his daunted heart.
“And thou art thrilled by the sublime, and all
The grandeur of thy destiny o'ercomes
Thy sense with its vast radiance! yet shrink not,
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Though thou with Epaphroditus shalt live,
Empedocles and Barcochab, in fame, (39)
Drawn in a prophet's robes and mural crown!
My own embraces shall solace the grief
Of thy rare Hebrew Venus, though thou diest,
And, if in dungeon thou art yet reserved,
A conqueror now, to grace the future games,
To her I will rehearse the tale and laud
Thy victory—and 'tis hard but beauty sheds
A guerdon on my service!—Dost thou smile?”
“Ay, that thou talkst of future games, doomed lord!
And utterest thy revenge in mockeries!
Yon sun, mid brazen heavens and sulphur clouds,
Now hastening to the horizon, ne'er shall rise
On the volcano cities; palace and shrine,
The battlemented fortress, festive dome,
Palæstra, amphitheatre and hall
Of judgment wrested to the despot's ends—
The household hearth—the stores of merchandise—
And many a lofty impious heart shall lie,
Shrouded and sepulchred in seas of flame,
Ere morrow breaks, beneath the burning deep.
And ages shall depart—and meteors glare,
And constellations vanish in the void
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Of the pale azure—and a thousand times
Earth's generations perish—ere the beams
Of morn shall light the cities of the Dead!
Quaff, feast, sing, laugh, exult and mock! ye eat
The Lectisternian banquet (40)—to the dead
Pour out libations—gorge the appetite—
Madden the brain—let Phrygian flutes inspire
Your latest joys—be merry with the storm
That howls e'en now along the Fire-Mount's depths!
For me, the martyr trusts his martyred God!
And not for all your grandeur—nor for earth's,
Would he partake your banquet and your doom!”
“Away! away! slaves! drag the traitor hence!
And with the gladiators in the cells
Let him await the combat of the beast!
My spirit wearies of his raven croak.
—So, now for better mirth! and the shouts
Of hurrying multitudes unto the games
Invoke my presence and the dial shades
The hour of carnage—do ye cry for blood?
By Jove! ye shall not lack, for never gazed
Imperial Nero on the sea of flame,
That surged along the shrieking capitol,
With such a rapture as my soul shall feel
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To watch the lingering agonies and breathe
The last deep death sighs and slow muttered groans
Of that accursed despiser of my power!
Come, friends! the people shall be pampered now.
One cordial cup to vengeance—then away!
The chariot races wait my word—the shouts
Rise like the roar of ocean o'er the hills,
And in the ghastly hell light of the mount,
Beneath whose deeps the Titans groan, the steeds
Caparisoned upon the towers uprear
Their heads, struggling to spring upon their course;
And yon vast cloud of faces through the gloom
Looks with a ruthlessness that fits my mood.—
I mount the Tribune! let the games begin!”
END OF CANTO II.
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THE LAST NIGHT OF POMPEII. CANTO III.
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'Tis night in autumn, and, methinks, the clouds,
That waft the storms of equinox, along
The sunset seas of troubled light, uplift
Their countless shapes of mystery and might,
On which the watcher of Endymion now
Not e'en a glimpse of her wan beauty casts,—
As erst, they rose o'er Athens, when, condemned
By all profaneness and impure desires,
The Titan evils of a rebel time,
The Attic sage, (41) amid the sobbed farewells
Of his disciples, drank the hemlock cup.
His spirit, for his birthage and the men
That by their deeds blasphemed it, all too pure,
Shrined in its sanctuary thoughts revealed
Unto no other in dim heathendom;
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And as his calm benign eyes through the folds
Of the earth brooding tempest saw the realms
Where immortality to one sole God
Hymned anthems in felicity of love,
He blessed the few who dared be just when Hate,
(Deferred, till from the holy Delian Isle,
Which neither birth nor death might desecrate,
The pilgrim barque brought the Theori home),
Reigned, amid idols, with archdæmon power.
Then, with the gentle sadness of the good,
His soul forgave the foes that wrought his fate,
Callias, Anytus and the viper bard
Famed Aristophanes—and prayed in peace!
Thus, casting from his tried and weary heart
Sorrow and sin, and giving back to earth
The passions born of dust, the Martyr Sage
Ascended unto Being's fountain stream
To meet the mercy he so greatly gave.
With such a night around me, let me tread,
In these far years, his path, and clothe my thought
With a forbearing patience under wrong,
Neglect, rebuke and ill rewarded toil,
That so, like the aurelia, I may rise
From dust, and be a winger of the air!
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Bereavement's lone lamenting tears and gleams
Cast from the memory of the dead, were all
The rainbows of my childhood: harsh behest
And bitter blame begot in solitude
The mood of melancholy; shadowed rills
And forests mantled with fantastic vines
And peaks the lightning made its home, became
The accustomed haunts of boyhood that ne'er knew
In bondage the free sunny thoughts of youth.
(Hate's serpent tongue hath ever on me shed
Its poison, and with lidless vigilance
Storied the trials of the fatherless
In the dark volume of its deep revenge.)
Then, with but one in all the world to love,
I burst the thraldom of my orphan days,
And wandered forth to live in antique lore;
Yet anxious present, pale remembrance, clouds
Prophetic gloomed along the deathless page
And hoarded in my heart their oracles.
From the magnificence of power, the charm
Of poesy and visions of old pomp,
I woke to feel the friendlessness of earth
And know myself a homeless pilgrim here.
Then manhood came; the world stirred round my way,
And Time's ambition, eagle-eyed, I saw
Was man's one worshipped idol, yet I sought
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No fellowship, but shunned the strife that sears
Youth's bosom with the torch that guides to fame.
Fame! 'tis the dew-hour's solitary dream,
The sighed breath of the midnight, heard alone
By mocking phantoms whose reply is—death!
Fame! 'tis the madness of consuming thought,
Toiling in tears, aspiring in despair,
That steals in Love's delirium, o'er the brain,
And, while it buries childhood's purest joys,
Wakes manhood's dreamy agonies to life!
Fame! 'tis the voice of sepulchres, to earth
Uttering the praises of the gone—the hymn
Of the dust shrouded, over pale decay,
And sounding to the spheres the name of him
Who loved unloved and trusted traitor hearts,
Whose bread was bitterness, whose years, a curse!
Fame! 'tis the sunbow o'er the abyss of Time—
A glance can melt it into showers of tears!
A glacier, hanging from a shattered peak—
A breath can bring the glittering ruin down!
A dream of glory with the seraphim—
Death's shadows gather round it in the dawn!
Therefore, I sought not power but peace, and love
Was my heart's paradise—the guiltless home
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Of all my wandering and tumultuous thoughts.
But that was blighted by the breath of hate,
And the relentless perjuries of men
O'erspread the mirrored mind with tempest clouds.
The hues of morn and evelight, virgin buds
Kissed by Aurora, woods, beneath whose wings
The fragrance and the music of glad life
Breathed, and the myriad charms that solitude
Folds mid the throbs of its deserted heart,
Yet o'er me hold dominion; but the light
Of their first beauty and the tenderest voice
Of Nature, throned in holy ministries,
That, in my earlier days, fell on my soul
Like seraphim revealings, wear not now
The magic loveliness which memory feels.
Torrents of wrongs and calumnies, hurled out
From the Gehenna of revenge to fall
Upon the Hinnom of the world, have raised
In me the spirit of a dreadless scorn
And multiplied contempt of human thoughts,
And these with thee, O Nature! mingle not.
But time hath its atonement though I sink
Beneath the burden of blaspheming speech,
And die beneath the Upas in my youth;
And to the Avenger of far ages now
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I do devote the ruined shrine, and raise
The incense of a spirit dimmed by tears,
Yet visited in loneliness by hymns
Of heaven and stars of glory wandering down.
But now the shadows of the buried move
Around me—beautiful and haughty forms—
Waked from the sleep of centuries to endure,
Again, the vanities of earth's best joys,
The certainties of evil—(mind restores
The dead)—and havoc cries ascend the heavens
From Pompeii's waiting thousands, while the groans
Of the convulsed volcano answer them.
The feeble and the famishing and slaves,
Whose toil a thousand years cannot reveal,
Alone are seen upon the public ways;
And every face is chronicled with care,
Loathing the lingering lapse of wasted breath,
The purposeless continuance of low toil
And want and thankless servitude, amid
The meshes of a wan and dim despair.
All else find pastime in the savageness
Of games where smiles and shouts are bought with blood.
Quæstor and ædile, senator and knight,
Censor and flamen, vestal and courtesan,
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Noble and commoner, commingling, meet
Amid the portent horrors of the day,
Whose shuddering light to Pompeii bids farewell,
In torture to seek rapture, in the pangs
Of gladiators gored and Christians gashed
And mangled to proclaim their ecstacies!
The dicer in the midst suspends his skill,
Tested by spoil wrung from the heart of want,
To witness and applaud the guiltier tests
Of science; and the banqueter forsakes
The wanton wassail of the flesh to seek
The richer revel of the bandit mind.
The spotless vestals the electric fire
Of Vesta's shrine desert and through their veils
Gaze, from the podium (42) of patrician pride,
On sinless blood poured o'er the trampled sand
From the hot veins of causeless strife; the judge
Bears from the Forum the remorseless thoughts,
Which, petrified by usage, have become
His Nature, never thrilled by mercy's voice.
The matron, whom dishonor dares not name;
The virgin in her beauty angel pure;
The warrior, who, like Blenhiem's victor, ne'er
The stategy of pale retreat had learned
In the swift triumph of his bannered march;
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The merchant, whose integrity no thought
Assails; the poet from his dreams of eld,
Elfland and wizardy and fabled gods;
Sages, by their disciples canonized,
Who from Saturnian visions, feigning power
Without oppression and republics stained
By no corruptions, bosomed mid the bowers
Of the Evening Isles or Orcades—arise
To look upon the agonistes' face
Imaging hell, and with the Circus' shouts
Mingle the fiats of philosophy! (43)
And augurs to perfect their oracles
Come now to gaze upon the cloven heart
And watch the spasms of Nature's utter throes.
And Pompeii's might and affluence await
The Prætor's voice, and the vast fabric gleams
With million glances and with million cries
Echoes, as from the tribune now the word
Of Power commands—“Lo! let the games begin!”
Cheered by the charioteers, who proudly stand,
Reining their fury, round the battlement
Rush the barbed chargers, like the samiel cloud
O'er Zara when the tropic burns with death;
And breathless watchers, who, upon the race,
Risk many a talent, when they would deny
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The alms of one poor obolus to woe,
Hang waiting sudden triumph or despair.
One wins, the prelude closes, and the host,
Like winds amid a wilderness of leaves,
Sink down and to the dread arena turn.
The trumpet summons—awful silence floats
Over the multitudes who fix their gaze
Upon the portals of the cells beneath.
They open and the gladiators move
Round the thronged circle to display their forms
Athlete and strong, and with the voice of death
Salute the ruthless Genius of the Games. (44)
From many a kingdom thralled they come—from realms
Spoiled by the locust hordes of Rome; the Gaul,
The Briton and the Thracian and the Frank,
The Wehrmanne and the Hebrew and the Celt,
Every clime's vanquished—every age's wreck,
All codes and creeds, strangers or friends, contend
Here in assassin strife to please their lords.
One deep wild shout like breaking billows swells,
Hailing the victims of the carnage fiend,
And on the sands two stalwart forms alone
Remain; and now Sigalion, voiceless god
Of Memphian mysteries, of all the host
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Seems sovereign, such a quivering stillness hangs
Over the thousands, who await the fray
With eyes electric as the ether fires,
Lips sealed by passion, hearts, like lava, still
In their intensest rapture! Bickering swords
Clash quickly, yet, with matchless skill, each blow
Or thrust falls on the flashing steel; and long,
With fixed eyes dropping not their folded lids,
And marble lips, and brows whereon the veins
Burn like the storm bolt o'er ice pinnacles,
And heaving bosoms, naked in their strength,
And limbs in every attitude of grace
And power—they struggle, not in hope of fame,
To win dominion, or achieve revenge;
But by their toil and agony and blood
To amuse the languid masters of the world.
From the free forest where he walked a king,
From his hearth's altar where he stood a priest,
Hither, in manacles, was guiltless man
Dragged for a mockery and gory show!
An erring glance—and o'er a prostrate form
Of beauty stands the unrejoicing foe,
Sternly receiving from the merciless
The still command to slay! and now he lifts
His serried sabre purpled to the hilt
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With that heart's blood he might have deeply loved!
One groan—a gasp—a shudder—and a soul
Hath gone to join the myriad witnesses
Who in the winds of northern wilds invoke
The Desolators to avenge their doom.
While o'er the sands they drag the dead, and strew
The place of carnage with uncrimsoned dust,
Mirth reigns and voices mingle everywhere,
Lauding the skill of the barbarian's strife
And the fine anguish of the dying slave.
Some talk of Titus, deeming him too just
And mild and generous while conspiracy
Mutters Domitian and Locasta's cup. (45)
And some relate, looking upon the mount,
Traditions of volcanoes direr far
Than aught they have to fear in latter days;
The depths of mountains boiling—valleys filled
With o'erthrown hills—and islands through the floods
Of ocean, apparitions, to the stars
Casting the torrid terrors of their birth.
Some say, the Prætor, when the lustrum ends,
Will govern Syria, and the sage surmise
That confiscation in Campania bought
The Senate's will that he should rule the east.
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Wine, love, the dance, war, wealth, ambition, hate,
Earthquake, plague, priesthood, revel, rival sects
In faith or knowledge—yesterday's delights,
To-morrow's deeds—each, all, in various speech,
Absorb the mind until the trumpet sounds.
Again, scarce breathing stillness falls—again
The gladiators enter, and the strife,
Protracted but to close in death, goes on.
A Briton, from the land of Caradoc,
Whose daily breath had been Plinlimmon's breeze,
Beneath the weapon of the Gaul pours out
Blood glowing with the soul of liberty,
And dies, to Druid altars in the realm
Of Mona, breathing back his heart, whose voice
Andraste, (46) in her home of vengeance, hears.
Triumphant shouts and quick expiring shrieks,
Dread silence and hurrahs and agonies
Succeed each mortal fray; and oft the sands,
Dabbled by gory fingers, trampled o'er
By feet that fail beneath the crushing strength
Of the grim joyless victors—are fresh strewn
To bury blood which sunk not into earth,
But from beholding heaven drew down the wrath
That made almighty Rome, to every land,
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A curse, a mockery and a shuddering jest.
“Three spirits wander by the spectre stream!
Are the great people glutted with the gore?”
Said Diomede, for Pansa's trial hour
With an exulting patience waiting long.
“Sound for the Christians and the desert king!
It darkens hurriedly and lava hail
Hurtles amid the ashes! we may rob
The God of Triumph of the Apostates' blood,
Or lose the rapture of their agonies.
Throw wide the portals! let the Christians come!”
The mitred ministers of idol rites
Came on in bannered pomp and conscious power,
Circling the arena; and the lictor guard
Followed with Pansa, and another form
That shrunk and faltered as ten thousand eyes
Searched out the fear that harrowed his pale heart.
Slow to the wail of Lydian flutes and blast
Of clarions breathing death, with looks of awe
Feigned and drooped eyes of mystery, around
Moved the procession; and the Præsul's (47) gaze
Wandered, in haughty majesty, along
The risen and revering host he blessed.
Few think, for thought is born of pain, and night
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Hath not repose, nor day, free bliss to him
Whose spirit's rapt; yet all can feel and fear,
For that is flesh—the earth-born shadows cast
Around them by their destinies; and they,
Who dwell in earth's abundance and from domes,
Stately and glistering, issue to receive
Guerdons of gold for oracles of wrath,
Illume not, save with fires of hell, the gloom
That curtains the black portal of the grave.
Virtue needs no interpreter, and vice,
Like palace tombs, mocks its own turpitude,
When painted o'er with saintly imageries;
But Faith, that searches not, dreads every dream,
Becoming to itself a hell, and seeks
Heaven through the pontiff, who, in secret doubt
Of joys elysian, craves earth's richest gifts,
And at his votary's phantom banquet smiles.
Before the image—wrought by Phidias, when
His faithless country unto rival realms
Banished his genius—of the supreme Jove,
The Præsul paused, and with adoring zeal
Cast incense on the altar; and soft wreaths
Of perfumed vapor round the eagle's beak,
The lifted sceptre and most godlike brow,
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(The artist's mind was the sole deity)
Curled as in homage, and one blended voice
Burst from the thousands—“Supreme Jove is God!”
Then all the priests from every fane and all
The accolytes and soldiers incense flung,
And the proud statue proudly seemed to smile.
Next, bent and trembling, blind and dumb with fear,
A Christian came (from noisome catacombs
Dragged forth to prove his feebleness of faith,)—
Like the great Pisan (48) who from midnight heavens
Could summon the eternal stars and fill
His angel spirit with their glories, yet
Abjured, in fear, before his bigot foes,
All the magnificence of thought, and knelt,
A hoar apostate, in the dust, to win
The lingering torture of a few sad hours,
And live—a monument of mind dethroned!
Onward he came with tottering childhood's step,
And with a face to all but terror dead.
He loved the light, adored the truth, yet dared
Meet not the perills it revealed; and now
Unto the altar's horns he clung and gasped
His panic breath, and gazed beseeching round
In utter horror's wilderment, and groped
Amid the shrine lights for the frankincense,
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With quivering fingers hurriedly; but Fear
Had quenched soul, feeling, sense—and, as his hand
Moved o'er the porphyry with a mindless aim,
And the wild pantings of his bosom spread
Hues ghastlier than death's along his cheek,
A stern centurion, with a frown of scorn
And sickened pity, from the censer took
The idol odor and upon the palm
Of the apostate threw it with a curse;
And ere the lapse of thought, his worship flashed
On the stern aspect of the demon god!
And, onward borne triumphantly, he passed
To meet, through every hour of haunted time,
Derision for denial of his Lord!
Hate on his brow and in his heart revenge,
(By bigot pride, scorned power and baffled lust
Engendered like the serpent on the waste)
Diomede glared upon the lofty form
That now before the awful statue stood.
No pride, lightening defiance, in his eye,
Dared the despair of fortune; no wild faith
Waited for miracles; but there he stood,
Beautiful in the magnificence of Truth,
Before the haughty scorners of chained beings,
The mightiest and most merciless of earth,
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His thought above the proudest of them all,
(For Roman mind to Christian creed was wed)
And on the countless eyes, that watched him, looked
With the sublime serenity unknown
To natures weak or terrible as hours
And their events decree. No joy, no pain,
Changed the fixed features of a calm resolve;
No glance betrayed a triumph in his fate,
Or doubt that might avert his martyrdom.
Upon the still crowd rose his gentle eyes
Blue and translucent as the heaven, as erst
The sungod, gliding up the glacier steeps
Of Hæmus, o'er the tossed ægean cast
His deathless smile among the Cyclades.
Pure in his faith and passionless in truth,
He never sought to seal with agony
The creed of the Anointed, but, instead,
Shunned Paynimrie's resort and dwelt in wilds,
Distrusting the infirmities that oft
O'ersway the spirit; but the fated hour
Had not passed by—the one deep love, that chained
His heart to earth, was parted, it might be
To welcome him to paradise, if not,
To meet his welcome there; and now, beyond
The tyrant passions of the world, he stood
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Dauntless mid heathendom, and thus, in tones
Strong as the ocean's, in whose utter deeps
The Alps may sink, yet leave vast deeps above,
He to the image of the Thunderer spake.
“Thou breathless Mocker of the humbled mind!
Thou Idol Image of remorseless power!
Shall being, quickened by the glowing blood,
In worship bow to thee, a sculptured block?
Shall intellect, illumed and magnified,
Whose home is ether, whose immortal hope
Is deathless glory, render unto thee
The adoration of the Deity?
Oh, how should men be just when they have throned
Amid the universe, o'erswaying all,
A supreme vengeance—demon deified?
Whose common and commended deeds would crown
A mortal with the curses of the world,
And round him spread a solitude of hate
Haunted alone by grovelling infamies!
Well wast thou fabled—son of Earth and Time!
For all impurities and ills are thine,
Transformed despoiler! e'en thy votaries mock
Yet mimic thee, as well they may, the work
Of their own lusts! Canst thou call forth one star
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Of all that blossom in the boundlessness
Of that undying heaven unknown to thee?
Will Mazzaroth or Mythra soar or sink?
Or terrible behemoth leave his depths?
Or the proud desert bird feel nature's love?
Because thou bidst? doth thine own eagle fear
The power men quail at? or the tempest float
Along Olympus, hurling arrowy fires,
In reverence to thy hest? yet why is this?
Methinks, I wander back to Pagan faith,
Thus questioning the hewn marble, which portrays
The apotheosis of man's worst revenge!
Beneath the unimaged, unimagined God,
Who hath no temple but infinity,
Where the great multitude of stars adore,
Flying along their glorious spheres—I stand
Here in thy home (it fits thy nature well)
And, without awe or exultation, dare
Deny thee incense, prayer, love, fear and faith!”
Not louder in its burning temple roared
The dread volcano when the firestorm came,
And earth's abysses quivered in their wrath,
Than now the voices of the phrenzied host.
“Tear the blasphemer! let the wild beasts forth
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To rend his limbs and gnash his living heart!
Impale the accursed! chain him within the fire!
Saw him asunder! cast his viper tongue
Into the serpents' den to poison them!”
Thus thousands shrieked—yet now the shoutings changed.
“Hark! Jove the Avenger answers! lo! the heavens
With shuddering clouds are filled and lightnings leap
Through their gored bosoms and the thunder shaft
Bickers along the air—great Jove beholds
And hears—now wither, thou blaspheming slave!”
Awed yet untrembling, Pansa calm replied.
“Ye hear no thunder—but Destruction's howl!
Ye see no lightning—but the lava glare
Of desolation sweeping o'er your pride!
Death is beneath, around, above, within
All who exult to inflict it on my heart,
And ye must meet it, fly when where ye will,
For in the madness of your cruelties
Ye have delayed till every hope is dead.
Let the doom come! our faiths will soon be tried.
Gigantic spectres from their shadowy thrones,
With ghastly smiles to welcome ye, arise.
The Pharaohs and Ptolemies uplift
Their glimmering sceptres o'er ye—bidding all
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Bare their dark bosoms to the Omniscient God:
And every strange and horrid mythos waits
To fold ye in the terrors of its dreams.
—For thee, proud Prætor! throned on human hearts
And warded by thy cohorts from the arm
Of violated virtue and spurned Right,
And suffering's madness—though thy regal tomb
Cepolline proudly stand, thy scattered dust
Shall never sleep within it; years shall fade
And nations perish and ten thousand kings
With all their thrice ten thousand victories
Rest in oblivion, and the very earth
Change with the changes of her children, yet
The empty mansion of thy vain renown
Shall stand that generations unconceived
May ask the deeds of him who was cast out
By vengeance from his fathers' sepulchres!”
“Let loose the wild beasts on him! why are we
Thus left to bear the traitor's arrogance?
The convict's scorn? the gladiator's speech?
Let loose the only foe that fits his faith;
The Mauretanian's arguments are meet
And suit his mystic cabala. Throw wide
The cells and let the lion make reply.”
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“The outer corridors,” the Lanista said,
“Are filled with ashes, and within the vaults
Arches have fallen and no power can ope
The portal of the Atlas beast, my lord!”
“Bring a ballista, then, and shatter it!
For by the eternal Fates and all the Gods!
This darer and blasphemer shall not scape.
Let none depart! why, would the people shun
The luxury of this despiser's pangs,
Or doth his airy talk infect your souls
And sway your thoughts by oracles of woe?
Spare Nazarenes! who would o'erturn the creed
And code of Rome, and on the throne of earth
Exalt the image of a felon God!
Gather your wisdom, men!—so, dash to earth
The portal and goad on the savage king!”
Still by Jove's altar standing, Pansa looked
Upon the fluctuating host around,
Some with fear trembling, some with baffled hate,
Some silent in excess of passion, some
Most earnest to behold the game of death,
And thus, like a cathedral knell, he spake.
“I show ye mercy none will show to me!
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Fly! ere the banners of the galleys wave
Beyond the cape! fly, ere the earth and air
Become the hell that fiction fables! fly
Ere carnage shrieks amid the torrent fire!
For me 't is nought—for you, 't is all—away!”
Yet, mocking truth and justice, all from flight
Turned back, and in the joy of shedded blood
Leaned o'er the arena. From the shattered cell
The famished lion sprung, with coiling mane
And fiendish eyes and jaws that clashed for gore.
“Take thy sword, Christian! at thy foot it lies—
And let the heathen, as thou callest them, mark
And laud thy skill in combat! take thy sword!”
A demon smile convulsed the Prætor's lip,
Yet Pansa, in the deep unshaken voice
Of Truth's immortal sanctity replied.
“The Martyr needs no weapon: his defence,
Shield, sabre, helm, spear, banner, all are one.
A breath from the Eternal—a quick ray
From the immortality of God—he lives
But in His mercy, dies but when He wills.
—Thou mightiest monarch of the forest beasts!
Who from the heights of Atlas, on the brow
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Of perpendicular precipice alone
Planting thine armed foot, hast looked o'er sea
And waste, fearing no equal; or among
The haunted wrecks of Carthage, in the pangs
Of hunger revening, hast found no food
Where a great nation died that Rome might reign.
Thou fiercest terror of the wilderness!
Who, without contest, dost consume thy foe,
And walkst the earth a conqueror and a king!
Upon thee—though the extreme of famine gnaws
Thy vitals now—and thy flesh burns with stripes
Given to madden thee, and round and round
With Titan limbs thou leapst in bitter joy
Of human banquet, watching, with fierce eyes,
Terrible as is the simoom of thy clime,
The moment of thy certain victory—
Upon thee now I fix the eye, whose light
Was born of God's Eternity, and while
Destruction from the face of Deity
Lours o'er creation, I do bid thee kneel
There in the gory dust! ay, by the Power
Of Him who made thee, monster! I command.”
A roar, as if a myriad thunders burst,
Now hurtled o'er the heavens, and the deep earth
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Shuddered, and a thick storm of lava hail
Rushed into air to fall upon the world.
And low the lion cowered, (49) with fearful moans
And upturned eyes and quivering limbs and clutched
The gory sand instinctively in fear.
The very soul of silence died, and breath
Through the ten thousand pallid lips unfelt
Stole from the stricken bosoms; and there stood
With face uplifted and eyes fixed on air,
(Which unto him was thronged with angel forms)
The Christian—waiting the high will of heaven.
A wandering sound of wailing agony,
A cry of coming horror o'er the street
Of Tombs arose, and all the lurid air
Echoed the shrieks of hopelessness and death.
Then through the gates and o'er the city rushed
A ghastly multitude, naked and black
With sulphur fumes and spotted o'er with marl
That clung unto the agonizing flesh
Like a wronged orphan's curse. In terror blind,
They rushed, in dreadful companies, along
The solitary Appian Way, and e'er
Their awful voices howled the horrors forth.
“Destroyed! wrecked in its beauty—all destroyed!
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Billows of lava boil above the towers
Of Herculaneum! we alone are left!
The lovely city! all our happy homes!
Buried in blackness 'neath a sea of fire!
The deluge came along the shattering rocks—
We fled and met another—yet again
We turned dismayed and a third fiery flood
Came down in ruin's grandeur on our path!
Between the mountain and the sea we scaped.
Oh, many a corse beneath the depths hath mixed
With the consumed, consuming clay, and lo!
A Solfatara o'er our city rolls,
Boiling in deeps of blackness! on—away!
What fated madness holds the death-games now?
Rise, Pompeii! fly, the Fates delay not here!”
Down to the dark convulsive sea they rushed,
O'er them the volcano, and beneath,
The earthquake, and around, ruin and death.
“Hear ye not now?” said Pansa. “Death is here!
Ye saw the avalanche of fire descend
Vesuvian steeps, and in its giant strength
Sweep on to Herculaneum; and ye cried,
“It threats not us, why should we lose the sport?
Though thousands perish, why should we refrain?”
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Your sister city—the most beautiful—
Gasps in the burning ocean—from her domes
Fly the survivers of her people, driven
Before the torrent floods of molten earth
With desolation red—and o'er her grave
Unearthly voices raise the heart's last cries—
“Fly, fly! O horror! O my son! my sire!”
The hoarse shouts multiply; without the mount
Are agony and death—within, such rage
Of fossil fire as man may not behold!
Hark! the Destroyer slumbers not—and now,
Be your theologies but true, your Jove,
Mid all his thunders, would shrink back aghast,
Listening the horrors of the Titans' strife.
The lion trembles; will ye have my blood?
Or flee ere Herculaneum's fate is yours?”
Vesuvius answered: from its pinnacles
Clouds of far-flashing cinders, lava showers,
And seas, drank up by the abyss of fire
To be hurled forth in boiling cataracts,
Like midnight mountains, wrapt in lightnings, fell.
Oh, then, the love of life! the struggling rush,
The crushing conflict of escape! few, brief,
And dire the words delirious fear spake now—
-- 166 --
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One thought, one action swayed the tossing crowd.
All through the vomitories madly sprung,
And mass on mass of trembling beings pressed,
Gasping and goading, with the savageness
That is the child of danger, like the waves
Charybdis from his jagged rocks throws down,
Mingled by fury—warring in their foam.
Some swooned and were trod down by legion feet;
Some cried for mercy to the unanswering gods;
Some shrieked for parted friends for ever lost;
And some, in passion's chaos, with the yells
Of desperation did blaspheme the heavens;
And some were still in utterness of woe.
Yet all toiled on in trembling waves of life
Along the subterranean corridors.
Moments were centuries of doubt and dread;
Each breathing obstacle a hated thing:
Each trampled wretch, a footstool to o'erlook
The foremost multitudes; and terror, now,
Begat in all a maniac ruthlessness,
For in the madness of their agonies
Strong men cast down the feeble who delayed
Their flight, and maidens on the stones were crushed,
And mothers maddened when the warrior's heel
Passed o'er the faces of their sons! The throng
-- 167 --
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Pressed on, and in the ampler arcades now
Beheld, as floods of human life rolled by,
The perfect terrors of the destined hour.
In gory vapors the great sun went down;
The broad dark sea heaved like the dying heart,
'Tween earth and heaven hovering o'er the grave,
And moaned through all its waters; every dome
And temple, charred and choked with ceaseless showers
Of suffocating cinders, seemed the home
Of the triumphant desolator Death.
One dreadful glance sufficed—and to the sea,
Like Lybian winds, breathing despair, they fled.
Nature's quick instinct, in most savage beasts,
Prophecies danger ere man's thought awakes,
And shrinks in fear from common savageness,
Made gentle by its terror; thus, o'erawed
E'en in his famine's fury by a Power
Brute beings more than human oft adore,
The Lion lay, his quivering paws outspread,
His white teeth gnashing, till the crushing throngs
Had passed the corridors; then, glaring up
His eyes imbued with samiel light, he saw
The crags and forests of the Appenines
Gleaming far off, and with the exulting sense
-- 168 --
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Of home and lone dominion, at a bound,
He leapt the lofty palisades and sprung
Along the spiral passages, with howls
Of horror through the flying multitudes
Flying to seek his lonely mountain lair.
From every cell shrieks burst; hyænas cried
Like lost child stricken in its loneliness:
The giant elephant with matchless strength
Struggled against the portal of his tomb,
And groaned and panted; and the leopard's yell
And tyger's growl with all surrounding cries
Of human horror mingled; and in air,
Spotting the lurid heavens and waiting prey,
The evil birds of carnage hung and watched,
As ravening heirs watch o'er the miser's couch.
All awful sounds of heaven and earth met now;
Darkness behind the sungod's chariot rolled,
Shrouding destruction, save when volcan fires
Lifted the folds to gaze on agony;
And when a moment's terrible repose
Fell on the deep convulsions, all could hear
The toppling cliffs explode and crash below,
While multitudinous waters from the sea
In whirlpools through the channelled mountain rocks
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Rushed, and, with hisses like the damned's speech,
Fell in the mighty furnace of the mount.
Tyrant not dastard, daring in his guilt
And fearless of its issues, Diomede
Frowned on the panic flight and in his wrath
Man, earth and heaven, demons and gods defied.
“The craven people—e'en my very slaves
Have fled as dust-born vassals ever flee,
And I am left alone with marble gods
And howling savageness, mid showers of flame.
Gods! I trust not elysium feigned by them
Who make the earth a very mock of hell.
Ay, roar, yell, struggle till your fierce hearts burst!
And with thy thousand thunders shake the throne
Of Jove, Vesuvius! and the world confound!
I have not loved nor sought the love of man,
And higher than his nature I know not,
Nor lower; and alone I sit to laugh
At mortal fear and dare immortal hate,
For, if aught die not, 't is revenge and pain.”
“Hath memory wed with madness that thou sayst
`Alone,' proud Prætor? one yet looks on Jove
And sees no deity; one yet awaits
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The pleasure of Campania's haughty lord.
The hour and scene fit well the deadly fight,
Yet I behold no foe; what wouldst thou more?”
Pansa stood motionless and spake in scorn.
“Thou damned Nazarene! the imperial law
Shall forge new fetters for thy treacheries,
Thy necromancies and apostate deeds.
Meantime exult, thank, praise and bless thy God,
Convict redeemer, buried deity,
That my condition fits not contest now
With thine, or wolves should ravine on thy limbs
And eagles' talons bear to mountain cliffs
Thy heart yet quivering with the pulse of fear.
Some fiendish potence foils me now; again
Thou shalt not win fire-fiends unto thy aid:
Yet, Pompeii shall acclaim thine agonies—
Again, thou shalt not scape though hell arise!”
“Again we shall not meet in all the realms
Of universal being—all the hours
That linger on eternity! we part
For ever now, each to his deathless doom.
But had not other creed than vengeance filled
A Roman's mind with mercy, words like thine,
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Now thy prætorians leave us twain, the one
With all to lose, the other, all to gain,
Would bring a direr parting hour, howe'er
Thy Punic blood and Volscian pride revolt.
Oh, thou mayst scoff! thou wouldst outdare the fiends
And mock in Orcus sin's undying moans;
But here we part, proud victim! so, farewell!
Jehovah's wrath is o'er thee—o'er us all—
The shocked earth cries unto the blackened heavens,
The mighty heart of earthly being bursts.
And thou shalt quickly know what Hebrew awe
Trembled to hear, El Shaddai—'t is a name
The phantoms ye adore and curse have borne
Vainly—yon mount is its interpreter—
The Almighty looks in lightning from His throne.
Jove's shrine is covered with the lava shower,
The ashes gather round me! oh, farewell!”
Through deepening cinders, tossing sulphur clouds,
And victims shrieking in their agonies,
The Prætor sought his way. His harnessed steeds
Maddened by fear, had with his chariot flown,
The charioteer had perished 'neath the wheels:
And haughtily through all the Appian Way,
Among the whirlpool waves of human life,
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And lighted by destruction's breath of flame,
He struggled tow'rd his palace, to the wrath
Of heaven fronting defiance, e'en while Death
Dwelt in the bosom of all elements
And the world trembled! hastening to his dome,
Of power in Syrian splendors and a fame
Immortal as the flatterer's pander verse,
He dreamed; and bearing to the vaulted crypt,
Whose labyrinths wandered far beneath the hills,
His gold and gems, he on his household closed
The marble door, deeming their safety won,
Whose strangled death cries rose unheard—whose bones
The daily sunlight of a thousand years
Ne'er visited beneath the deeps of death.
Pansa, meantime, in gladiator guise.
By other paths had hurried from the scene,
And now beneath the skies, where billowy clouds
Rolled in the awful volcan light, beheld
The fabric of destruction vast and lone.
Vesuvius poured its deluge forth, the sea
Shuddered and sent unearthly voices up,
The isles of beauty, by the fire and surge
Shaken and withered, on the troubled waves
Looked down like spirits blasted; and the land
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Of Italy's once paradise became
The home of ruin--vineyard, grove and bower,
Tree, shrub, fruit, blossom—love, life, light and hope,
All vanishing beneath the fossil flood
And storm of ashes from the cloven brow
Of the dread mountain hurled in horror down.
The echoes of ten thousand agonies
Arose from mount and shore, and some looked back
Cursing, and more bewailing as they fled,
With glowing marl or ashes on their heads.
“Thou one great Spirit of all being! here,
Where power is helplessness and hope, a dream,
Here in the horror of the havoc, breathe
Thy smile upon my soul, and time and death,
With all their anguish, shall o'erawe me not!”
Imploring thus, the Christian held his way
Through the wild scene, with undefined impulse,
Nor shunning death, nor daring it, but filled
With emanations of undying faith.
A voice, whose tones, like music heard when youth
Lives in the visions of the blue blest heaven,
Thrilled the quick heart of Pansa, from the gloom
Of a lone street came forth, and bended forms
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Stole from the hutted refuge of despair,
And tow'rd the Appian by the Forum fled.
And through the night the voice of age went up.(50)
“Tarry not, daughter! for these aged limbs,
Dust they soon must be—though the world revered—
And, if my hour be come, the woe is past.
But hasten, daughter! moments have become
Ages—the air, the earth, the ocean blend
Their agonizing energies—away!
Beneath the o'erhung rocks—where fishers wont
To moor their boats, now stranded on the beach,
The pinnace lies I spake of—and the word
Is Marcion! Thither, without let or fear,
Hasten: a Christian from Tergeste (51) holds
Command, and ere an hour its oars and sails
Shall waft you far from ruin round us now.”
“Nay, father! to the shadow of your roof
I hurried when the violater's wrath
Burned o'er me—and thine own familiar fears
Denied me not a refuge! we shall sleep
Mid fire together or together flee.
Yet more—no barque shall bear me from the beach
Till the last hope expires that from his bonds
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Pansa may burst to bear us company.
Perchance, among the fugitives, e'en now
He flies, and wanders by the ocean marge”—
On through the death-storm the Decurion sprung.
“No, Mariamne! my beloved restored!
Here, in the home of desolation, here,
I fold thee spotless to my happy heart!
And find my paradise in ruin's arms!
But here we pause not to pour out our souls.
A pinnace lies beneath the cliffs, sayst thou?
Thy hoary wisdom hath redeemed us, sage!
Stay thy weak limbs upon my strength! on! on!
I snatched the slaughtered gladiator's helm—
Cast o'er your heads your mantles—so, away!”
Down the steep path unto the moaning sea
They passed with quickened steps, and upward glanced
The maiden of the vaults of Isis, once,
Eyes floating in the farewell tears of love,
As by the black and desolated home
Of all her childhood's innocence and bliss,
They fled like shades and to the ramparts came,
Upon them, by the fiend-light full revealed,
Wandered the hoary idol priest of Jove
-- 176 --
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In maniac horror; and amidst the roar,
The riot and the wreck of earth and heaven,
Thus rose his awful voice in prophecies.
Call in thy cohorts, Rome! from every land
Thy power hath deluged with unsinning blood!
Call in thy legions from Iberia's strand,
From Albion's rocks, and Rhætia s mountain wood!
The foe, like glaciers hurled
Through clouds of lightning on the world,
Springs from his forest in the wildest north,
Scenting his prey afar:
And, like the samiel, from the waste comes forth
To steep your glories in the gore of war.
Hark! the whole earth rejoices!
Sea shouts to isle and mountain unto main,
And ocean to the heaven, with myriad voices—
Rome's sepulchre shall be amid her slain,
And as she spared not, none shall spare her now,
But Hun, Goth, Vandal, Alemanne and Frank
Shall lift the poison cup all earth hath drank,
And steep her shuddering lips, and on her brow
Pour blood for ointment, and upon her head,
Till thousand ages have in darkness fled,
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Mocking, press down
The accursed crown
Which shall not cease to bleed as conquered men have
bled!”
Thy monarchs, slaves to every lust and crime,
Shall fall as they have fallen by the sword
Or Colchian chalice, and unweeping time
O'erthrow the deities by dust adored,
And leave but ruin to lament
O'er pillar, shrine and battlement,
And solitude o'er desert realms to moan,
Where warriors mocked chained kings and called the
world their own!
The coal black petrel and the grey curlew
Shall wing thy waters and see not thy sail;
From trembling towers the stork shall watch the blue
Of the lone heavens and hear no human hail:
For in the vales that bask in bloom,
The Pontine's flowers, the bright Maremma's green,
Shall dwell the shadow of the tomb,
In Love's voluptuous arms, the tyrant death unseen!
And Nero's golden house shall be
The pallid serf's abode,
And tombs imperial, soaring from the sea,
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Shall guide the corsair through his night of blood.
Despair with folded wings,
Where the Eagle's pinions hung,
Shall cower beneath the throne of kings,
Who o'er the Alps the curse of hell have flung,
Woe to the beautiful! the barbarian comes!
Woe to the proud! the peasant lays thee low!
Woe to the mighty! o'er your kingly domes
The savage banner soars—the watchfires glow;
Triumph and terror through the forum rush,
Art's trophies vanish—learning's holy lore,—
Alaric banquets while red torrents gush,
Attila slumbers on his couch of gore!
And there the eye of Ruin roams
O'er guilt and grief and desolation;
And there above a thousand homes
The voice of Ruin mourns a buried nation.
Buried. O Rome! not like Campania's cities,
To wake in beauty when the centuries flee,
But in the vice and coward shame none pities,
The living grave of guilt and agony!
Alas! for Glory that must close in gloom!
Alas! for Pride that loves the tyrant's scorn!
Alas! for Fame that from the Scipios' tomb
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Rises to look on infamy and mourn!
But Vengeance, wandering long,
With many a battle hymn and funeral song,
Shakes Fear's pale slumber from earth's awestruck eyes,
And bids Sarmatia's hordes redeem her agonies!
Yet not alone the civic wreath,
The conqueror's laurel, the triumpher's pride
Shall wither 'neath the samiel eye of Death;
On Rome's old mount of glory shall abide,
Tiar'd and robed like the Orient's vainest kings,
The hoar devoter of earth's diadems; (52)
His glance shall haunt the heart's imaginings—
His footfall shall be felt where misers hoard their gems!
And from the palace of the Sacred Hill
The thrice crown'd pontiff shall to earth dispense
The awful edict of his mighty will,
And reign o'er mind in Fear's magnificence.
Prince, peasant, bandit, slave shall bow
Beneath his throne in vioceless adoration,
And years of crime redeem by one wrung vow;
And age on age shall die—and many a nation
Sink in the shadow of the tyrant's frown
And disappear,
Without a song or tear,
-- 180 --
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While clarion'd conquerors tread
In hymned triumph o'er the dead;
And wild barbarian hordes,
Whose faith and fealty glitter with their swords,
Shall feel the mellowing breath of human love,
And dwell entranced amid romance and lore;
Yet from the awful Vatican no dove
Shall bear freewill to any earthly shore!
But he, the Rock amid the ruins old
Of mythologic temples, shall o'ersway
The very Earth, till thrones and kingdoms sold
And cmpires blasted in the blaze of day—
Awake the world—and from the human heart
The crushing mountain of Oppression cast;
Then man shall bid all tyrannies depart,
And from the blue blest heavens elysium dawn at last!”
“How like the gusty moans of tempest nights
O'er the broad winter wilderness, that voice
Ascends; and what a horrid gleam is flung
Along that face of madness, as it turns
From sea to mountain, and the wild eyes burn
With revelations of the unborn time!
We may not linger—shelter earth denies—
The very heavens like a gehenna lour—
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And ocean is our refuge—on—on—on!
Yet hark! the wildest shriek of death! and lo!
The priest falls gasping from the ramparts now—
The breath of oracles upon his lips,
The Future's knowledge in his dying heart,
He reels—pants—gazes on the sulphur light—
(How like the glare of hell it wraps his form!)
Expiring, mutters woe—and falls to sleep
Shroudless in the red burial of the doomed!
On to the ocean! and, far o'er its waves,
To Rhætia's home of glaciers—if God wills—
Look not behind! a moment gains the shore!”
So Pensa cried and windlike was their flight.
The pinnace cleaves the waters; heaving, black
And desolate, the dismal billows groan
And swell the dirges of the earth and sky.
Upon the bosom of the sea, the barque
Sweeps on in darkness, save when furnace light
Flares o'er the upturned floods; and now they pass
The promontory's cliffs, and o'er the deeps
Fly like a midnight vision.—From the shores
Voices in terror cry, and countless shapes
Now in the lava blaze appear—and now
Vanish in the fell night, and, far away,
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Pliny's lone galleys, dimly from their prows
Casting their watchlights through the fitful gloom,
Hear not the implorings of the fugitives.
Hear us! oh, hear us! will no God reply?
No ear of mercy open to our prayer?
Hath utter vengeance throned the accursed sky?
And must we perish in this wild despair?
Hear us! oh, hear us! will no mortal hand
Succor in horror—pity in our dread?
Woe! Desolation sweeps o'er all the land!
Woe! woe! earth trembles 'neath the Death-King's tread!
Oh, Fear and Gloom and Madness are around,
And hope from earth is vain;
The sky is blackness—waves of fire, the ground—
And every's bosom's breath—the pulse of pain.
Yet let us not deny,
In shuddering nature's agony,
The universal and immortal King!
But, rather, while we gasp,
Our dying children closer clasp, [spring!
And pass, with them, the wave where blossoms deathless
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Who bids us sink resigned?
Who bids us bless the Slayer?
And mid the storm of ruin, blind,
Scorched—blasted—dying—breathe again the spurned-back
prayer?
Let the Creator in his vengeance take
The life he heaped on men—
No sigh—no voice—no tear shall slake
The almighty hatred that could thus condemn!
He made us but to die—
To die yet see our city's burial first—
And he shall feast upon no wailing cry
From me:—take what thy wrath has cursed!
I yet have power to hate and scorn the might
That strews the earth with dead in Desolation's night!
Blaspheme not in thine anguish!
We may not hope to linger,—
Yet, quickly quenched, we shall not moan and languish
In wan disease—emaciating pain—
And living death—when e'en an infant finger
Would be a burden! oh, the fiery rain
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Comes down and withers and consumes
The mighty and the weak,
And not a voice from out yon horrid glooms,
That shroud the Sarnus and the sea
Replies to hearts that break
In agony.
Yet shut not out the hope elysian,
And fold not darkness to thy breast!—
—My babe! oh, sweet, most blest and briefest vision!
As at thy birthhour, here's thy home of rest—
My bosom was thy pillow—'t is thy tomb—
It gave thee life—and, in thine early death,
Thy latest throbs to mine—
—Oh, like harp thrillings in thy bliss and bloom,
While o'er my face stole soft thy odorous breath,
They touched my spirit with a joy divine!—
Thy latest throbs shall be
The warning that shall waft
My soul up through the starr'd infinity,
E'en where the nectar cup is by the Immortals quaff'd.
And must we die?
In being's brightness and the bloom of thought!
Sepulchred beneath a sunless sky!
And all the spirit's godlike powers be—nought!
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Wail o'er thy doom, fair boy!
Shriek thy last sorrow, maiden! for the doom,
That o'er earth's tearless joy
Rolls gory mid the shadows of the tomb!
The tomb! there shall be none
Save dark-red shroudings of the lava sea—
The fire shall quench the agonizing groan—
Moments become—eternity!
And must we perish so?
Sink, shuddering, thus and gasp our breath in flame?
And o'er our unremembered burial flow
The pomps and pageants of a worthless name?
At wonted feasts, no voices shall salute—
In temple hymns, no soul-breathed strain awake
Our memories from the realms for ever mute—
But o'er our graves barbarian kings shall slake
Their demon thirst of gore—
And redcross slayers march in bandit ranks,
From Alp and sea and shore,
To stain the Asian sands with hordes of slaughtered
Franks!
Wail for the joy that never more shall breathe!
Wail for the lore and love, the bloom and bliss
That to the ocean world of fire bequeathe
Their paradise of hope! and this
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Must be our only trust—to quickly die—
And leave the pleasant things of earth behind;
Through thousand ages unremembered lie
Unknown to sunbeam smile or breath of summer wind!”
“Away! bewailers of decrees that bring
Rest to the grief and restlessness of earth!
Away! pale tremblers mid the dawn of spring
That o'er the winter of your fate comes forth!
What are your woes to his,
Who from the throne of power beheld the glory—
Ambition's grandeur, pleasure's bliss,
Gleam on the Syrian towers like gods in minstrel story?
Gone! gone! why, see ye not the eyes
Of hell's own Furies glaring through the flame?
And hear ye not the wild, deep, dreadful cries
That call in curses on the Avenger's name?
No barque to bear us o'er the sea!
No refuge on the mountain's breast!
Earth, time, and hope like unblest shadows flee,
And death and darkness pall our everlasting rest!
What spectre sail sweeps you?
Now in the black night buried—now upon
-- 187 --
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The billow in the horrid light careering.
Like a spirit that hath passed
The glacier and the Lybian blast,
It feels not human fearing!
It flies toward the promontory now—
The torrent fire of ruin hangs above—
And earthly forms are standing by the prow,
Clasped in the arms of love!
O Hell of Thought! and must I—in the fame
Of sumless wealth and power—sink down and die,
And, helpless, hopeless, leave the Prætor's name
To moulder with the herd's beneath
The mountain monument of death,
And be a doubt, or mock and scorn
To fierce barbarians, yet unborn,
When in the spoiler's lust, they seek the Italian sky?
Ay, curse the gods who in their hate created
The serpent death that gnaws your core of life!
E'en in your childhood's beauty, ye were fated
To writhe, howl, shudder, perish in the strife
Of elemental agonies,
As were your sires by ghastly wan disease;
And wrath, shame, guilt, despair, remorse and pain,
Their heritage and testament, have swept
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Your hearts as vultures sweep the battle plain!
Then by the tears unpitied grief hath wept,
By lone bereavement's wail,
And Evil's dark ovations,
Bid universal Ruin hail!
And swell Death's monarch march o'er buried nations!
For me—as fits the Roman lord,
When hopeless peril darkens on his way,
I crave no lingering tortures with the horde
Who gasp and grovel in the slave's dismay,
And to the sick and sulphurous air,
Where Gloom and Fire and Horror dwell,
Pour out to fiction's gods the unheard prayer,
And seek in clouds a heaven, to find on earth a hell!
Thou one Omnipotent Despair!
Whose shadow awes the prostrate world,
Thou kingly Queller of lamenting care!
Oblivion's voiceless home prepare,
And let Extinction's lightning bolt be hurled!
Banished, yet dauntless, doomed but undismayed,
Least willing, yet without a groan or sigh,
I go—dark Nemesis! thou art obeyed!
Thou awful Cliff! the billow's funeral cry
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Thrills through my quickened sense,
That feels with life intense,
Yet, ere a moment's lapse, this soul shall sleep—
This form, a sweltering corse, beneath the unsounded
deep!”
Thus to the proud heart's last throb breathing out
Defiance and blaspheming wrath—though wrecked
And ruined, hurling his terrific thoughts
Of baffled vengeance to the shuddering heavens—
A monumental Memnon, sending up
Death's music to the burning hills of death—
Upon the extremest edge of awful cliffs,
That beetled o'er the blackened billows now
Howling their dirges o'er the expected dead,
The haughty Prætor stood alone, and flung
His agonizing spirit's deadliest glance,
The farewell execrating look of pride,
Unquenched by horror, unsubdued by death,
O'er hill, shore, forest, ocean—earth and heaven;
Then, towering like a rebel demigod,
And to the fierce volcano turning quick
His brow of fearful beauty, while his lips
Curved with convulsive curses, o'er the rocks—
Down—down the void, black depths, like a bann'd star,
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(That tosses through the universe, a hell,)
Or demon from a meteor mountain's brow,
He plunged and o'er him curled the shivering floods!
Meantime, charred corses in one sepulchre
Of withering ashes lay, and voices rose,
Fewer and fainter, and, each moment, groans
Were hushed, and dead babes on dead bosoms lay,
And lips were blasted into breathlessness
Ere the death kiss was given, and spirits passed
The ebbless, dark, mysterious waves, where dreams
Hover and pulses throb and many a brain
Swims wild with terrible desires to know
The destinies of worlds that lie beyond.
The thick air panted as in nature's death,
And every breath was anguish; every face
Was terror's image, where the soul looked forth,
As looked, sometimes, far on the edge of heaven,
A momentary star the tempest palled.
From ghastlier lips now rose a wilder voice,
As from a ruined sanctuary's gloom,
Like savage winds from the Chorasmian waste
Rushing, with sobs and suffocating screams:
And thus the last despair had utterance.
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“It bursts! it bursts! and thousand thunders blent,
From the deep heart of agonizing earth,
Knell, shatter, crash along the firmament,
And new hells peopled startle into birth.
Vesuvius sunders! pyramids of fire
From fathomless abysses blast the sky;
E'en desolating Ruin doth expire,
And mortal Death in woe immortal die,
Torrents like lurid gore,
Hurled from the gulf of horror, pour,
Like legion fiends embattled to the spoil,
And o'er the temple domes,
And joy's ten thousand homes,
Beneath the whirlwind hail and storm of ashes boil.
The surges, like coil'd serpents, rise
From midnight caverns of the deep,
And writhe around the rocks,
That shiver in the earthquake's shocks,
And through the blackness of fear's mysteries,
Chained Titans from their beds of torture leap,
And o'er the heavens Eumenides
Seek parting souls for prey—
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Oh God! that on these dark and groaning seas
Would soar one other day!
Vain is the mad desire,
Darkness, convulsion, fire,
Infernal floods, dissolving mountains, fold
The helpless children of woe, sin and Time—
O'er fiery wrecks hath Desolation rolled,
The Infinite Curse attends the finite crime!
No melancholy moon to gaze
With dim cold light remote!
No star, through stormy spheres, with holy rays,
O'er dying eyes, like hope of heaven, to float!
No spot—the oasis of the waste above—
Whose still, sweet beauty glistens
Through clouds that heave and riot in wild masses,
Breaks on the breaking heart! no seraph listens
In blue pavilions, while the spirit passes,
And o'er the dreariest waters bears,
Beyond the unburied's desert shore,
To skies ambrosial and elysian airs,
Where e'en the awful Destinies adore!
No tenderness from lips,
Blackened and swoln and gasping, steals
Amidst the soul's eclipse;
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Each, in the solitude of misery, feels,
Ineffable, his own despair,
And sinks unsolaced, unsolacing, down,
O'ercanopied by sulphurous air,
Palled, tombed by seas that terror's last cry drown!
Oh, still the piteous cry
Mounts up the heavens—“fly! fly!”
“Whither?” the billows roar
Among the wrecks and rent crags of the shore.
“Whither?” the Volcano's voice
Repeats, bidding pale death rejoice.
Oh, Hope with madness dwells,
And love of life creates the worst of deaths;
Hark! world to world ten thousand voices swells—
“Resign your breaths!”
We die; the sinner with the sinless dies,
The bud, the flower, the fruit corruption wastes,
Childhood and hoar age blend their agonies,
Destruction o'er the earth—the missioned slayer hastes.”
Swiftly along the Pæstan gulf before
The Alpine gale, scudded the Christians' barque;
Night veiled Lucania's rugged shore but oft
The dreadful radiance of the firemount hung
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Upon the mightiest Apennines, and there
The giant cliffs, hoar forest trees, and glens
Of cataracts—gleamed on the fear-charmed eye,
Distinct though distant; and Salernum's crags
Spurned the chafed sea that rushed before the prow.
“Lo! Pliny's galleys speed to aid at last!”
Said Pansa, gazing through the meteor light,
Towards the Sarnus and the victim host.
“All shall not perish; oars and sails bear on
The Roman armament—and now, in hope
Renewed exulting, from the dust upspring
A thousand prostrate shapes, and on the rocks
Lift their scorched hands, and shout (though we hear not)
The late rescuers on; yet many a heart
Will throb and thrill no more, but buried lie,
Like its own birthplace, till oblivion rests
On the Campanian cities and their guilt.
—Salernum's rocks for ever from our gaze
Hide the dark scene of trial, and we leave,
With swelling canvass, Rome's imperial realm,
Where Christian faith shall, like the sandal tree,
Impart its odor to the feller's axe,
To seek a hermitage in wilds afar.
—Now, as we hasten, let our spirits soar
To Him who shelters when the avenger slays!”
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“Alone, in darkness, on the deep,
Spirit of Love! redeemed by thee,
While fear its watch o'er ruin keeps,
Thy grace our sign and shield, we flee.
The billows burst around our barque,
The death streams roll and burn behind—
Thy mercy guides our little ark,
Thy breath can swell or hush the wind.
Thy footsteps ruffled not the wave
When drowning voices shrieked for aid—
The cavern'd billow yawn'd—a grave—
“Be still!” it heard Thee and obeyed!
From idol rites and tyrant power,
Now o'er the midnight sea we fly—
Be with us through our peril's hour!
Saviour! with Thee we cannot die!
“To men a mocked and homeless stranger,
Thy truth, love, grace and goodness blest
The world, whose first gift was a manger,
Whose last, the Cross! no down of rest
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Pillowed, O Christ! thy holy head,
No crown, but thorns, Thy temples wreathed,
Yet Thou the Death King captive led,
And through the tomb a glory breathed!
The scorner all Thy love reviled,
Thy path was pain, thy kingdom, shame,
Yet sorrow on thine aspect smiled,
E'en Death revered Thy deathless name!
The bittern moans where Zion stood,
The serpent crawls where nations trod—
Be with us on the mountain flood!
Fill our dim hearts with light from God!
“The flame, that wrapt my childhood's bowers,
Revealed Thee to my darkened mind;
Thee whom e'en sybils, seers and powers
Of Night in Delphi's grove divined;
With the dim glimpse of shadowed thought,
They saw the Atoner's form of light,
Yet pale doubt sighed o'er visions wrought,
The idol world still walked in night.
Now paymm dreams of dread no more,
The feigned response, the magi's charms,
O'erawe and on my spirit pour
The torturer's spells, the tomb's alarms.
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On starlight wings, through blooming air,
Hope unto heaven bears human love;
Doubt, grief, lone tears, remorse, despair
Haunt not the soul's own home above.
My chill heart cheered by thoughts like these,
Far from my ruined bowers I roam;
Thy love lights up the midnight seas,
Thy smile is earth's most heavenly home!
“Dimmer, like hoary years that bring
Life's winter, wanes the volcan's glare;
Destruction furls his meteor wing,
Watching the desert of despair!
Now far before the æolian Isles
Send up their vassal fires, but still,
Where fair Trinacria's Hybla smiles,
Darkness sits throned on ætna's hill.
Soon, by Sicilia's whirlpool streight,
Our barque shall seek the Ionian sea,
And o'er blue Adria, pagan hate
To Rhætian hills hunt not the free!
The sun, with beams that bloom, shall soar,
And vineyard, vale, hillside and grove,
Sea, mountain, meadow, isle and shore
Bask in voluptuous lights of love.
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Yet darker ruin must descend,
Which man alone on man may rain,
And locust king and harlot fiend
With the heart's wrecks strew mount and plain.
Away! the grave's wild shadows swim
O'er my pale eve of autumn days;
Away! the wild to harp and hymn
Like sphere-voiced choirs, shall breathe, O Christ! Thy
love and praise!”
'T is summer's tenderest twilight, and the woods
Glow like an inner glory of the mind,
And rills, veining the verdure, and among
Vines, rose-lipp'd flowers and odorous shrubs in mirth
And music dancing, purl from fountains known
But to the gnomes and kobalds of the Alps—
Mysterious springs, o'er which eternal night
Watches and weeps in solitude, her tears
Mingling, at last, with the green ocean deeps.
Brightness and beauty, love and blessedness
Breathe on each other's bosoms, while afar,
From jagged cliffs the torrent cataract
Hymns the Omnipotent; and from the brows
Of desolate peaks ice-diademed, which thought
Alone may climb, the mountain avalanche,
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Vast Ruin, falls and with it ruin bears.
All else is loneliness, beauty and love,
Peace and a hallowed stillness, and the souls
Of the lone mountain dwellers, in the hush
Of solitude and nature's majesty,
Partake the sanctity and power around.
The sunbow o'er precipitated floods—
The ice-lakes, and ravines where chaos dwells
And desolation; flowers beneath snow-hills,
Where the great sun looks wan—the mightiest pines,
Rooted in chasms, that o'er the unfathomed gorge
Hang, wave and murmur—vales of paradise,
That smile upon suspended horror—all
With memories and oracles and dreams,
Time's hopes, eternity's imaginings,
Infinity's vast grandeur, the meek love
Of birthplace home,—the boundlessness of power,
The holiness of earth's reliance—fill
The awed and yet exultant intellect!
Flowered fields and harvests bloom around the door
Of a lone forest cottage, and amidst
The Eden of the wild a hoary head
Is lifted and the wan lips move in prayer.
Around, three beings kneel in thought o'erawed,
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Vesper responses breathing from high hearts,
The ordeal of the paynim sternly proved—
And Echo whispers in the clefted rocks.
From meek adorings and communing love,
Then rose they, not as worshippers arise
In latter days of evil, with proud eyes
And minds revenge corrodes, but violet-like,
And gentle as the dawn breath of sweet May,
Patient, serene and robed in holy thoughts.
Dayspring and dewbeam, thus, year after year,
Dawned and departed, and the seasons had
Their own peculiar joys in Pansa's home.
And there—the Roman Convert's testament—
The storm-nursed heritors of Faith, blasphemed,
Throned Liberty on Alpine pinnacles,
And bade her temple be the Switzer hills.
There in love worshipped, there with hoar hairs died
The Christians, but the deathless spirit Rome
Gave to her son, and Mariamne's heart,
Bequeathed—in Freedom and God's holy Law,
With tyrant Wrong warred through Guilt's thousand
years.
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