Then oft, in truth, and oft in blissful hours,38
Miss'd was that faithful guide through stormier life.
Ah common lot! how oft, mid summer flowers,
We miss the soother of the winter strife;
How oft we mourn in Fortune's sunlit vale
Some silenced heart with which we shared the gale!
But absent not the dove, albeit unseen;39
In some still foliage it had found its nest:
At night it hover'd where his steps had been,
Pale through the moonbeams in the air of rest;
By the lull'd wave and shadowy banks it pass'd,
Lingering where love with Ægle linger'd last.
And when with chiller dawn resought the lone40
And leafy gloom in which it shunn'd the day,
Beneath those boughs you might have heard it moan,
Low-wailing to itself its plaintive lay;
Till with the sun rose all the songs that fill
Morn with delight; and then the dove was still.
But now, as towards the Temple of the Shades41
The King went heavily—a gleam of light
Shot through the gloaming of the cedarn glades,
And the dove glided to his breast: the sight
Came like a smile from Heaven upon the King,
And his heart warm'd beneath the brooding wing.
Strange was the thrill of joy, beyond belief,42
Sent from the soft touch of those plumes of down!
He was not all deserted in his grief,
The brows of Fate relax'd their iron frown;
And his soul quicken'd to that glorious power
Which fronts the future and subdues the hour;
The joy it brought, the dove refused to share;43
As it it felt the tempest in the sky,
Trembling, it nestled to its shelter there,
Nor lifted to the light its drooping eye.
Not, as its wont, to guide it came; but brave
With him the ills from which it could not save.
Now lost the lovelier features of the land,44
Dull waves replace the fount, dark pines the bowers,
Grey-streeted tombs, far stretch'd on either hand,
Rear the dumb city of the Funeral Powers.
Massive and huge, behold the dome of dread,
Where the stern Death-god frowns above the dead.
Hewn from a rock, stand the great columns square,45
With triglyphs wrought and ponderous pediment;
Such as yet greet the musing wanderer, where,
Near the old Fane to which Etruria sent
Her sovereign twelve, the thick-sown violet blooms,
In Castel d'Asso's vale of hero-tombs.[8]
Passing a bridge that spann'd the barrier wave,46
They reach'd the Thebes-like porch;—the Augur here,
First entering, leaves the King. Within the nave
Now swell the flutes (which went before the bier
What time the funeral chaunt of Pagan Rome
Knell'd some throne-shatterer to his six-feet home).
Jar back the portals—long, in measured line,47
There stand within the mute Auruspices,
In each pale hand a torch; and near the shrine
Sit on still thrones, the guardian deities;
Here Sethlans,[9] sovereign of life's fix'd domains—
There fatal Northia with the iron chains.