| |
| FOREVER and forever shalt thou be | |
| Unto the lover and the poet dear, | |
| Thou land of sunlit skies and fountains clear, | |
| Of temples, and gray columns, and waving woods, | |
| And mountains, from whose rifts the bursting floods | 5 |
| Rush in bright tumult to the Adrian sea: | |
| O thou romantic land of Italy! | |
| Mother of painting and sweet sounds! though now | |
| The laurels are all torn from off thy brow, | |
| Yet, though the shape of Freedom now no more | 10 |
| May walk in beauty on thy piny shore, | |
| Shall I, upon whose soul thy poets’ lays, | |
| And all thy songs and hundred stories, fell | |
| Like dim Arabian charms, break the soft spell | |
| That bound me to thee in mine earlier days? | 15 |
| Never, divinest Italy,—thou shalt be | |
| For aye the watchword of the heart to me. | |
| |
| Famous thou art, and shalt be through all time: | |
| Not that because thine iron children hurled | |
| Like arrows o’er the conquest-stricken world | 20 |
| Their tyrannies, but that, in a later day, | |
| Great spirits, and gentle too, triumphing came; | |
| And, as the mighty day-star makes its way | |
| From darkness into light, they toward their fame | |
| Went, gathering splendor till they grew sublime. | 25 |
| |
| Yet first of all thy sons were they who wove | |
| Thy silken language into tales of love, | |
| And fairest far the gentle forms that shine | |
| In thy own poets’ faery songs divine. | |
| O, long as lips shall smile or pitying tears | 30 |
| Rain from the eyes of beauty,—long as fears | |
| Or doubts or hopes shall sear or soothe the heart, | |
| Or flatteries softly fall on woman’s ears, | |
| Or witching words be spoke at twilight hours, | |
| Or tender songs be sung in orange bowers,— | 35 |
| Long as the stars, like ladies’ looks, by night | |
| Shall shine,—more constant and almost as bright,— | |
| So long, though hidden in a foreign shroud, | |
| Shall Dante’s mighty spirit speak aloud: | |
| So long the lamp of fame on Petrarch’s urn | 40 |
| Shall, like the light of learning, duly burn; | |
| And he be loved,—he with his hundred tales, | |
| As varying as the shadowy cloud that sails | |
| Upon the bosom of the April sky, | |
| And musical as when the waters run | 45 |
| Lapsing through sylvan haunts deliciously. | |
| Nor may that gay romancer who hath told | |
| Of knight and damsel and enchantments old, | |
| So well, be e’er forgot; nor he who sung | |
| Of Salem’s holy city lost and won, | 50 |
| The seer-like Tasso, who enamoured hung | |
| On Leonora’s beauty, and became | |
| Her martyr,—blasted by a mingled flame. | |
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