She lightly passed; nor did she once opine
How, better than all books, she had raised for me
In swift perspective Europe’s history
Through the vast years of Cæsar’s sceptred line.
For in my distant plot of English loam
’Twas but to delve, and straightway there to find
Coins of like impress. As with one half blind
Whom common simples cure, her act flashed home
In that mute moment to my opened mind
The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome.
Rome: On the Palatine
(April, 1887)
We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,
And passed to Livia’s rich red mural show,
Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico,
We gained Caligula’s dissolving pile.
And each ranked ruin tended to beguile
The outer sense, and shape itself as though
It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow
Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle.
When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head,
Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss:
It stirred me as I stood, in Cæsar’s house,
Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led,
And blended pulsing life with lives long done,
Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.
Rome
Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter
(April, 1887)
These numbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry
Outskeleton Time’s central city, Rome;
Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome
Lies bare in all its gaunt anatomy.
And cracking frieze and rotten metope
Express, as though they were an open tome
Top-lined with caustic monitory gnome;
“Dunces, Learn here to spell Humanity!”
And yet within these ruins’ very shade
The singing workmen shape and set and join
Their frail new mansion’s stuccoed cove and quoin
With no apparent sense that years abrade,
Though each rent wall their feeble works invade
Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin.
Rome
The Vatican—Sala Delle Muse
(1887)
I sat in the Muses’ Hall at the mid of the day,
And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,
And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,
Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.
She was nor this nor that of those beings divine,
But each and the whole—an essence of all the Nine;
With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place,
A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous face.
“Regarded so long, we render thee sad?” said she.
“Not you,” sighed I, “but my own inconstancy!
I worship each and each; in the morning one,
And then, alas! another at sink of sun.
“To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth
Of yesternight with Tune: can one cleave to both?”
—“Be not perturbed,” said she. “Though apart in fame,
As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the same.
—“But my loves go further—to Story, and Dance, and Hymn,
The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim—
Is swayed like a river-weed as the ripples run!”
—“Nay, wight, thou sway’st not. These are but phases of one;
“And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,
One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be—
Extern to thee nothing. Grieve not, nor thyself becall,
Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!”
Rome
At the Pyramid of Cestius
Near The Graves Of Shelley And Keats
(1887)
Who, then, was Cestius,
And what is he to me?—
