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[First published 1867.]
I IN Paris all look’d hot and like to fade. | |
| Brown in the garden of the Tuileries, | |
| Brown with September, droop’d the chestnut-trees. | |
| ’Twas dawn; a brougham roll’d through the streets, and made | |
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| Halt at the white and silent colonnade | 5 |
| Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease, | |
| Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease, | |
| Sate in the brougham, and those blank walls survey’d. | |
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| She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled | |
| To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine; | 10 |
| Why stops she by this empty play-house drear? | |
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| Ah, where the spirit its highest life hath led, | |
| All spots, match’d with that spot, are less divine; | |
| And Rachel’s Switzerland, her Rhine, is here! | |
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II UNTO a lonely villa in a dell | 15 |
| Above the fragrant warm Provençal shore | |
| The dying Rachel in a chair they bore | |
| Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle, | |
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| And laid her in a stately room, where fell | |
| The shadow of a marble Muse of yore— | 20 |
| The rose-crown’d queen of legendary lore, | |
| Polymnia—full on her death-bed. ’Twas well! | |
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| The fret and misery of our northern towns, | |
| In this her life’s last day, our poor, our pain, | |
| Our jangle of false wits, our climate’s frowns, | 25 |
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| Do for this radiant Greek-soul’d artist cease; | |
| Sole object of her dying eyes remain | |
| The beauty and the glorious art of Greece. | |
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III SPRUNG from the blood of Israel’s scatter’d race, | |
| At a mean inn in German Aarau born, | 30 |
| To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn, | |
| Trick’d out with a Parisian speech and face, | |
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| Imparting life renew’d, old classic grace; | |
| Then soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn, | |
| A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn, | 35 |
| While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place— | |
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| Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone | |
| She had—one power, which made her breast its home! | |
| In her, like us, there clash’d, contending powers, | |
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| Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome. | 40 |
| The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours; | |
| Her genius and her glory are her own. | |
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