Poems of the Past and the Present | Page 7

unseen,
unguarded dust

The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,
And made immortal through
times to be; -
Though it only lived like another bird,
And knew not
its immortality.
Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell -
A little ball of feather and
bone;
And how it perished, when piped farewell,
And where it
wastes, are alike unknown.
Maybe it rests in the loam I view,
Maybe it throbs in a myrtle's green,

Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue
Of a grape on the slopes of yon
inland scene.
Go find it, faeries, go and find
That tiny pinch of priceless dust,

And bring a casket silver-lined,
And framed of gold that gems
encrust;
And we will lay it safe therein,
And consecrate it to endless time;

For it inspired a bard to win
Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.
IN THE OLD THEATRE, FIESOLE
(April, 1887)
I traced the Circus whose gray stones incline
Where Rome and dim
Etruria interjoin,
Till came a child who showed an ancient coin

That bore the image of a Constantine.
She lightly passed; nor did she once opine
How, better than all books,
she had raised for me
In swift perspective Europe's history
Through
the vast years of Caesar's sceptred line.
For in my distant plot of English loam
'Twas but to delve, and
straightway there to find
Coins of like impress. As with one half blind

Whom common simples cure, her act flashed home
In that mute
moment to my opened mind
The power, the pride, the reach of
perished Rome.
ROME: ON THE PALATINE
(April, 1887)

We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,
And passed to
Livia's rich red mural show,
Whence, thridding cave and
Criptoportico,
We gained Caligula's dissolving pile.
And each ranked ruin tended to beguile
The outer sense, and shape
itself as though
It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow
Of scenic
frieze and pompous peristyle.
When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head,
Began to melodize a
waltz by Strauss:
It stirred me as I stood, in Caesar's house,
Raised
the old routs Imperial lyres had led,
And blended pulsing life with lives long done,
Till Time seemed
fiction, Past and Present one.
ROME
BUILDING A NEW STREET IN THE ANCIENT
QUARTER
(April, 1887)
These numbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry
Outskeleton Time's
central city, Rome;
Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome
Lies
bare in all its gaunt anatomy.
And cracking frieze and rotten metope
Express, as though they were
an open tome
Top-lined with caustic monitory gnome;
"Dunces,
Learn here to spell Humanity!"
And yet within these ruins' very shade
The singing workmen shape
and set and join
Their frail new mansion's stuccoed cove and quoin

With no apparent sense that years abrade,
Though each rent wall their
feeble works invade
Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin.
ROME
THE VATICAN--SALA DELLE MUSE
(1887)
I sat in the Muses' Hall at the mid of the day,
And it seemed to grow
still, and the people to pass away,
And the chiselled shapes to

combine in a haze of sun,
Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed
forth One.
She was nor this nor that of those beings divine,
But each and the
whole--an essence of all the Nine;
With tentative foot she neared to
my halting-place,
A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous
face.
"Regarded so long, we render thee sad?" said she.
"Not you," sighed I,
"but my own inconstancy!
I worship each and each; in the morning
one,
And then, alas! another at sink of sun.
"To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth
Of yesternight
with Tune: can one cleave to both?"
- "Be not perturbed," said she.
"Though apart in fame,
As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the
same.
0. "But my loves go further--to Story, and Dance, and Hymn, The lover
of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim - Is swayed like a
river-weed as the ripples run!"
0. "Nay, wight, thou sway'st not. These are but phases of one;
"And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,
One that out of thy
brain and heart thou causest to be -
Extern to thee nothing. Grieve not,
nor thyself becall,
Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love
at all!
ROME
AT THE PYRAMID OF CESTIUS
NEAR THE
GRAVES OF SHELLEY AND KEATS
(1887)
Who, then, was Cestius,
And what is he to me? -
Amid thick
thoughts and memories multitudinous
One thought alone brings he.
I can recall no word
Of anything he did;
For me he is a man who
died and was interred

To leave a pyramid
Whose purpose was exprest
Not with its first design,
Nor till, far
down in Time, beside it found their rest
Two countrymen of mine.
Cestius in life, maybe,
Slew, breathed out threatening;
I know not.
This I know: in death all silently
He does a kindlier thing,
In beckoning pilgrim feet
With marble finger high
To where, by
shadowy wall and history-haunted street,
Those matchless singers lie . . .
--Say, then, he lived and died
That stones which bear his name

Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide;
It is an ample fame.