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(From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)
BUT lo! the dome,—the vast and wondrous dome, | |
| To which Diana’s marvel was a cell,— | |
| Christ’s mighty shrine above his martyr’s tomb! | |
| I have beheld the Ephesian’s miracle,— | |
| Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell | 5 |
| The hyena and the jackal in their shade; | |
| I have beheld Sophia’s bright roofs swell | |
| Their glittering mass i’ the sun, and have surveyed | |
| Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem prayed. | |
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| But thou, of temples old, or altars new, | 10 |
| Standest alone, with nothing like to thee,— | |
| Worthiest of God, the holy and the true. | |
| Since Zion’s desolation, when that he | |
| Forsook his former city, what could be | |
| Of earthly structures, in his honor piled, | 15 |
| Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty, | |
| Power, glory, strength, and beauty, all are aisled | |
| In this eternal ark of worship undefiled. | |
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| Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not; | |
| And why? It is not lessened; but thy mind, | 20 |
| Expanded by the genius of the spot, | |
| Has grown colossal, and can only find | |
| A fit abode wherein appear enshrined | |
| Thy hopes of immortality; and thou | |
| Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, | 25 |
| See thy God face to face, as thou dost now | |
| His holy of holies, nor be blasted by his brow. | |
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| Thou movest, but increasing with the advance, | |
| Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise, | |
| Deceived by its gigantic elegance; | 30 |
| Vastness which grows, but grows to harmonize, | |
| All musical in its immensities; | |
| Rich marbles, richer painting, shrines where flame | |
| The lamps of gold, and haughty dome which vies | |
| In air with earth’s chief structures, though their frame | 35 |
| Sits on the firm-set ground, and this the clouds must claim. | |
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| Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break, | |
| To separate contemplation, the great whole; | |
| And as the ocean many bays will make, | |
| That ask the eye, so here condense thy soul | 40 |
| To more immediate objects, and control | |
| Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart | |
| Its eloquent proportions, and unroll | |
| In mighty graduations, part by part, | |
| The glory which at once upon thee did not dart, | 45 |
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| Not by its fault, but thine. Our outward sense | |
| Is but of gradual grasp, and as it is | |
| That what we have of feeling most intense | |
| Outstrips our faint expression, even so this | |
| Outshining and o’erwhelming edifice | 50 |
| Fools our fond gaze, and, greatest of the great, | |
| Defies at first our nature’s littleness, | |
| Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate | |
| Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate. | |
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