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(From The Burden of Egypt)
TRANQUIL above the rapids, rocks, and shoals, | |
| The Tivoli of Egypt, Philæ lies; | |
| No more the frontier-fortress that controls | |
| The rush of Ethiopian enemies,— | |
| No more the Isle of Temples to surprise, | 5 |
| With hierophantic courts and porticos, | |
| The simple stranger, but a scene where vies | |
| Dead Art with living Nature, to compose | |
| For that my pilgrimage a fit and happy close. | |
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| There I could taste without distress of thought | 10 |
| The placid splendors of a Nubian night, | |
| The sky with beautiful devices fraught | |
| Of suns and moons and spaces of white light: | |
| While on huge gateways rose the forms of might, | |
| Awful as when the people’s heart they swayed, | 15 |
| And the grotesque grew solemn to my sight; | |
| And earnest faces thronged the colonnade, | |
| As if they wailed a faith forgotten or betrayed. | |
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| There too, in calmer mood, I sent aflight | |
| My mind through realms of marvel stretching far, | 20 |
| O’er Abyssinian Alps of fabled height, | |
| O’er deserts where no paths or guidance are, | |
| Save when, by pilotage of some bright star, | |
| As on the ocean, wends the caravan; | |
| And then I almost mourned the mythic bar | 25 |
| That in old times along that frontier ran, | |
| When gods came down to feast with Ethiopian man. | |
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| For I remembered races numberless, | |
| Whom still those latitudes in mystery fold, | |
| And asked, what does the Past, my monitress, | 30 |
| For them within her genial bosom hold? | |
| Where is for them the tale of history told? | |
| How is their world advancing on its way? | |
| How are they wiser, better, or more bold, | |
| That they were not created yesterday? | 35 |
| Why are we life-taught men, why poor ephemerals they? | |
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