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| IN ancient Rome a temple stands, | |
| Around whose aged feet | |
| The tide flows up from many lands, | |
| And eddies through the street; | |
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| The human tide that ceaseless pours | 5 |
| To break its waves on Rome, | |
| And gathers from a thousand shores | |
| Its scallop shells and foam. | |
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| That temple’s shrines are empty now, | |
| Its altars dark and bare, | 10 |
| The goddess of the marble brow | |
| No longer worshipped there. | |
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| No longer wings her spells abroad | |
| The fevered pulse to heal, | |
| And unrelenting, if implored, | 15 |
| Were deaf to each appeal. | |
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| “Restore, restore,” she scorns to say, | |
| “The homage which ye gave, | |
| And when laborious pains ye pay, | |
| I will consent to save.” | 20 |
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| Her home was on the radiant shores | |
| Where snow-white Athens shines; | |
| How beautiful her servitors, | |
| How stately were her shrines! | |
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| And how, from farthest east to west, | 25 |
| And by the unknown sea, | |
| What goddess was so well beloved, | |
| So much revered, as she! | |
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| A sweeter faith is now enshrined | |
| In Athens and in Rome; | 30 |
| Her honors everywhere declined, | |
| Her priests without a home. | |
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| And even what she nobly taught, | |
| And what she symbolled then, | |
| Is banished out of human thought, | 35 |
| And quite forgot by men. | |
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| And yet methinks her statue stands, | |
| And makes a mute appeal, | |
| “Give helpful blessing, all ye lands, | |
| On women bent to heal.” | 40 |
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