Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79. | | | | Rome | | Rome | | Alexander Pope (1688–1744) |
| | (From Moral Essays)
SEE the wild waste of all-devouring years! | |
| How Rome her own sad sepulchre appears, | |
| With nodding arches, broken temples spread! | |
| The very tombs now vanished like their dead! | |
| Imperial wonders raised on nations spoiled, | 5 |
| Where mixed with slaves the groaning martyr toiled: | |
| Huge theatres, that now unpeopled woods, | |
| Now drained a distant country of her floods: | |
| Fanes, which admiring gods with pride survey, | |
| Statues of men, scarce less alive than they! | 10 |
| Some felt the silent stroke of mouldering age, | |
| Some hostile fury, some religious rage. | |
| Barbarian blindness, Christian zeal conspire, | |
| And papal piety, and Gothic fire. | |
| Perhaps, by its own ruins saved from flame, | 15 |
| Some buried marble half preserves a name; | |
| That name the learned with fierce disputes pursue, | |
| And give to Titus old Vespasian’s due. | | | | |
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