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After a Picture by Linton
IS it some vision of the elder day, | |
| Won from the Dead-Sea waters, by a spell | |
| Like hers who waked the prophet?—or a dream | |
| Of burning Egypt,—ere the Libyan sand | |
| Had flung its pall above its perished world,— | 5 |
| Dreamt on its dreary grave, that has no flowers? | |
| It is the eastern orphan’s ocean-home! | |
| The southern queen! the city of the sea, | |
| Ere Venice was a name! the lofty heart | |
| That battled for the empire of the world, | 10 |
| And all but won,—yet perished in the strife! | |
| Now, in her young, proud beauty; the blue waves, | |
| Like vassals, bending low to kiss her feet, | |
| Or dancing to their own sweet minstrelsy! | |
| The olives hanging round her crested front, | 15 |
| Like laurel-crowns upon a victor’s brow! | |
| Beneath her palms, and mid her climbing bowers, | |
| Darts, like a sunny flash, the antelope! | |
| And bound the wild deer, where the severing boughs | |
| Wave forth a goddess! in her hunter-guise, | 20 |
| She wakes the perfumes of the Tyrian’s groves, | |
| To welcome from the waves her pilgrim boy, | |
| And point his tangled pathway, to the towers | |
| That to his homeless spirit speak of home! | |
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| Alas! the stately city! it is here, | 25 |
| Here, mid this palace pomp and leafy store, | |
| (Bright as some landscape which the poet sees | |
| Painted, by sunset, on a summer sky, | |
| In hues the dolphin borrows when he dies!) | |
| Mid all this clustering loveliness and life, | 30 |
| Where treads the Trojan,—that, in after years, | |
| A lonelier exile and a loftier chief | |
| Sat amid ruins! | |
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