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(From Italy)
LO, far on the horizon’s verge reclined | |
| A temple, reared as on a broken throne: | |
| The sun’s red rays in lurid light declined | |
| O’er clouds that mutter forth a thunder-tone, | |
| Gleam athwart each aerial column shown | 5 |
| Like giants standing on a sable sky; | |
| What record tells it in that desert lone? | |
| Resting in solitary majesty | |
| Eternal Pæstum there absorbs the heart and eye. | |
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| Pause here, the desolate waste, the lowering heaven, | 10 |
| The sea-fowl’s clang, the gray mist hurrying by, | |
| The altar fronting ye with brow unriven, | |
| In isolation of sublimity, | |
| Mates with the clouds, the mountains, and the sky: | |
| But the sea breaks no more against his shrine, | 15 |
| Hurled from his base the ocean-deity; | |
| His worshippers have passed and left no sign, | |
| The Shaker of the Earth no more is held divine! | |
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| There like some Titan throned in his retreat | |
| Of deserts, the declining sun’s last rays | 20 |
| Falling round him on his majestic seat, | |
| Each limb dilated in the twilight haze | |
| Of the red distance darkening on the gaze: | |
| An image whose august tranquillity | |
| The presence of unconscious power betrays, | 25 |
| Whose co-mates are the hills, the rocks, the sea, | |
| Even so the awestruck soul reposing dwells on thee! | |
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| And there thou standest stern, austere, sublime, | |
| Strength nakedly resposing at thy base, | |
| Making a mockery of the assaults of time; | 30 |
| Earthquakes have heaved, storms shook, the lightning’s trace | |
| Left the black shadows time shall not efface, | |
| And the hot levin dinted where it fell! | |
| But on thy unperturbed and steadfast face | |
| Is stamped the impress of the unchangeable, | 35 |
| That fixed forever there thy massive form shall dwell. | |
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| Spirit of gray Antiquity! enthroned | |
| With solitude and silence here, proclaim | |
| Thou, brooding o’er thy altar-place, who owned, | |
| Who reared, that mightiest temple? from whence came | 40 |
| The children of the sea? what age, what name, | |
| Bore they who chose this plain their home to be? | |
| Arena meted for the race of fame: | |
| For gods to applaud the deeds of liberty, | |
| Knowledge, and glorious art, that flows but from the free. | 45 |
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