1345 | Born with her birth. No; he shall not expire |
While in those warm and lovely veins the fire | |
Of health and holy feeling can provide | |
Great Nature’s Nile, whose deep stream rises higher | |
Than Egypt’s river: – from that gentle side | |
1350 | Drink, drink and live, old man! Heaven’s realm holds no such tide. |
CLI | |
The starry fable of the milky way | |
Has not thy story’s purity; it is | |
A constellation of a sweeter ray, | |
And sacred Nature triumphs more in this | |
1355 | Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss |
Where sparkle distant worlds: – Oh, holiest nurse! | |
No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss | |
To thy sire’s heart, replenishing its source | |
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe. | |
CLII | |
1360 | Turn to the Mole which Hadrian rear’d on high, |
Imperial mimic of old Egypt’s piles, | |
Colossal copyist of deformity, | |
Whose travell’d phantasy from the far Nile’s | |
Enormous model, doom’d the artist’s toils | |
1365 | To build for giants, and for his vain earth, |
His shrunken ashes, raise this dome: How smiles | |
The gazer’s eye with philosophic mirth, | |
To view the huge design which sprung from such a birth! | |
CLIII | |
But lo! the dome – the vast and wondrous dome, | |
1370 | To which Diana’s marvel was a cell – |
Christ’s mighty shrine above his martyr’s tomb! | |
I have beheld the Ephesian’s miracle – | |
Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell | |
The hyæna and the jackall in their shade; | |
1375 | I have beheld Sophia’s bright roofs swell |
Their glittering mass i’ the sun, and have survey’d | |
Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem pray’d; | |
CLIV | |
But thou, of temples old, or altars new, | |
Standest alone – with nothing like to thee – | |
1380 | Worthiest of God, the holy and the true. |
Since Zion’s desolation, when that He | |
Forsook his former city, what could be, | |
Of earthly structures, in his honour piled, | |
Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty, | |
1385 | Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty, all are aisled |
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled. | |
CLV | |
Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not; | |
And why? it is not lessen’d; but thy mind, | |
Expanded by the genius of the spot, | |
1390 | Has grown colossal, and can only find |
A fit abode wherein appear enshrined | |
Thy hopes of immortality; and thou | |
Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, | |
See thy God face to face, as thou dost now | |
1395 | His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow. |
CLVI | |
Thou movest – but increasing with the advance, | |
Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise, | |
Deceived by its gigantic elegance; | |
Vastness which grows — but grows to harmonise — | |
1400 | All musical in its immensities; |
Rich marbles – richer painting – shrines where flame | |
The lamps of gold – and haughty dome which vies | |
In air with Earth’s chief structures, though their frame | |
Sits on the firm-set ground – and this the clouds must claim. | |
CLVII | |
1405 | Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break, |
To separate contemplation, the great whole; | |
And as the ocean many bays will make, | |
That ask the eve — so here condense thy soul | |
To more immediate objects, and control | |
1410 | Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart |
Its eloquent proportions, and unroll | |
In mighty graduations, part by part, | |
The glory which at once upon thee did not dart, | |
CLVIII | |
Not by its fault – but thine: Our outward sense | |
1415 | Is but of gradual grasp – and as it is |
That what we have of feeling most intense | |
Outstrips our faint expression; even so this | |
Outshining and o’erwhelming edifice | |
Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great | |
1420 | Defies at first our Nature’s littleness, |
Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate | |
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate. | |
CLIX | |
Then pause, and be enlighten’d; there is more | |
In such a survey than the sating gaze | |
1425 | Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore |
The worship of the place, or the mere praise | |
Of art and its great masters, who could raise | |
What former time, nor skill, nor thought could plan; | |
The fountain of sublimity displays | |
1430 | Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of man |
Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions can. | |
CLX | |
Or, turning to the Vatican, go see | |
Laocoon’s torture dignifying pain – | |
A father’s love and mortal’s agony | |
1435 | With an immortal’s patience blending: — Vain |
The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain | |
And gripe, and deepening of the dragon’s grasp, | |
The old man’s clench; the long envenom’d chain | |
Rivets the living links, – the enormous asp | |
1440 | Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp. |
CLXI | |
Or view the Lord of the unerring bow, | |
The God of life, and poesy, and light – | |
The Sun in human limbs array’d, and brow | |
All radiant from his triumph in the fight; | |
1445 | The shaft hath just been shot – the arrow bright |
With an immortal’s vengeance; in his eye | |
And nostril beautiful disdain, and might | |
And majesty, flash their full lightnings by, | |
Developing in that one glance the Deity. | |
CLXII | |
1450 | But in his delicate form – a dream of Love, |
Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast | |
Long’d for a deathless lover from above, | |
And madden’d in that vision – are exprest | |
All that ideal beauty ever bless’d | |
1455 | The mind with in its most unearthly mood, |
When each conception was a heavenly guest – | |
A ray of immortality — and stood, | |
Starlike, around, until they gather’d to a god! | |
CLXIII | |
And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven | |
1460 | The fire which we endure, it was repaid |
By him to whom the energy was given | |
Which this poetic marble hath array’d | |
With an eternal glory – which, if made | |
By human hands, is not of human thought; | |
1465 | And Time himself hath hallow’d it, nor laid |
One ringlet in the dust – nor hath it caught | |
A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which ’twas wrought. | |
CLXIV | |
But where is he, the Pilgrim of my song, | |
The being who upheld it through the past? | |
1470 | Methinks he cometh late and tarries long. |
He is no more — these breathings are his last; | |
His wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast, | |
And he himself as nothing: – if he was | |
Aught but a phantasy, and could be class’d | |
1475 | With forms which live and suffer – let that pass – |
His shadow fades away into Destruction’s mass, | |
CLXV | |
Which gathers shadow, substance, life, and all | |
That we inherit in its mortal shroud, | |
And spreads the dim and universal pall | |
1480 | Through which all things grow phantoms; and the cloud |
Between us sinks and all which ever glow’d, | |
Till Glory’s self is twilight, and displays | |
A melancholy halo scarce allow’d | |
To hover on the verge of darkness; rays | |
1485 | Sadder than saddest night, for they distract the gaze, |
CLXVI | |
And send us prying into the abyss, | |
To gather what we shall be when the frame | |
Shall be resolved to something less than this | |
Its wretched essence; and to dream of fame, | |
1490 | And wipe the dust from off the idle name |
We never more shall hear, – but never more, | |
Oh, happier thought! can we be made the same: | |
It is enough in sooth that |