No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss To thy sire's heart, replenishing its source With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.

CLII.

Turn to the Mole which Hadrian reared on high,1
Imperial mimic of old Egypt's piles,2

1360

Colossal copyist of deformity,

Whose traveled fantasy from the far Nile's

Enormous model, doomed the artist's toils
To build for giants, and for his vain earth,

1365

His shrunken ashes, raise this dome: How smiles

The gazer's eye with philosophic mirth,

To view the huge design which sprung from such a birth!

CLIII.

But lo! the dome 3-the vast and wondrous dome,

To which Diana's marvel 4 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
The hyena and the jackal in their shade;

1370

I have beheld Sophia's 5 bright roofs swell
Their glittering mass i' the sun, and have surveyed

1375

Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem prayed;

CLIV.

But thou, of temples old, or altars new,

Standest alone, with nothing like to thee—

1 Now the castle of St. Angelo, once the mausoleum of Hadrian.

2 The pyramids.

4 The temple of Diana at Ephesus.

3 St. Peter's at Rome.

5 The gilded dome of St. Sophia's, Constantinople. The church is now a mosque.

Worthiest of God, the holy and the true.
Since Zion's desolation,1 when that He
Forsook His former city, what could be,

1380

Of earthly structures, in His honor piled,

Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty,

Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty all are aisled In this eternal ark of worship undefiled.

1385

CLV.

Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not;

And why? It is not lessened; but thy mind,
Expanded by the genius of the spot,

Has grown colossal, and can only find

1390

A fit abode wherein appear enshrined
Thy hopes of immortality; and thou
Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined,
See thy God face to face, as thou dost now
His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.

CLVI.

1395

Thou movest, but increasing with the advance,
Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise,
Deceived by its gigantic elegance;

Vastness which grows, but grows to harmonize-
All musical in its immensities;

1400

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
Sits on the firm-set ground, and this the clouds must claim.

CLVII.

Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break, 1405 To separate contemplation, the great whole;

1 The Jewish temple at Jerusalem, destroyed by the Romans A.D. 70.

And as the ocean many bays will make
That ask the eye-so here condense thy soul
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,

CLVIII.

1410

Not by its fault-but thine: Our outward sense
Is but of gradual grasp—and as it is

1415

That what we have of feeling most intense

Outstrips our faint expression; even so this

Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice

Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great
Defies at first our Nature's littleness,

1420

Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.

CLIX.

Then pause, and be enlightened; there is more
In such a survey than the sating gaze
Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore
The worship of the place, or the mere praise
Of art and its great masters, who could raise
What former time, nor skill, nor thought could plan;
The fountain of sublimity displays

1425

Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of man

Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions can.

1430

CLX.

Or, turning to the Vatican, go see

Laocoon's torture dignifying pain 1

1 The original Laocoön group is in the Vatican. (See Æneid, ii., for the story.)

A father's love and mortal's agony
With an immortal's patience blending: Vain
The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain
And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp,
The old man's clinch; the long envenomed chain
Rivets the living links,-the enormous asp
Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.

CLXI.

Or view the lord of the unerring bow,1
The god of life, and poesy, and light—
The sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight;
The shaft hath just been shot-the arrow bright
With an immortal's vengeance; in his eye
And nostril beautiful disdain, and might
And majesty, flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity.

CLXII.

1435

1440

1445

But in his delicate form-a dream of love,
Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast
Longed for a deathless lover from above,
And maddened in that vision-are expressed
All that ideal beauty ever blessed

1450

The mind within its most unearthly mood,

1455

When each conception was a heavenly guest

A ray of immortality-and stood

Starlike, around, until they gathered to a god!

CLXIII.

And if it be Prometheus 2 stole from heaven

The fire which we endure, it was repaid

1 The Apollo Belvedere.

2 Read Longfellow's poem, Prometheus, or the Poet's Forethought.

1460

By him to whom the energy was given
Which this poetic marble hath arrayed
With an eternal glory-which, if made
By human hands, is not of human thought;
And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor laid
One ringlet in the dust-nor hath it caught

A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas

wrought.

1465

CLXIV.

1

But where is he, the Pilgrim 1 of my song,
The being who upheld it through the past?
Methinks he cometh late and tarries long.
He is no more-these breathings are his last;
His wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast,
And he himself as nothing:-if he was
Aught but a fantasy, and could be classed

With forms which live and suffer-let that pass-
His shadow fades away into Destruction's mass,

CLXV.

1470

1475

Which gathers shadow, substance, life, and all

That we inherit in its mortal shroud,

And spreads the dim and universal pall

1479

Through which all things grow phantoms; and the cloud

Between us sinks and all which ever glowed,

Till Glory's self is twilight, and displays

A melancholy halo scarce allowed

To hover on the verge of darkness; rays

Sadder than saddest night, for they distract the gaze, 1485

CLXVI.

And send us prying into the abyss,

To gather what we shall be when the frame

1 Childe Harold, last mentioned in Canto III. Stanza LV.