Let the King's woe its muse in Silence claim,98
When sense return'd, and solitary life
Sate in the Shadow!—shade or sun the same,
Toil hath brief respite; man is made for strife,
Woman for rest!—rest, bright with dreams, is given,
Child of the heathen, in the Christian heaven!
And to the Christian prince's plighted bride,99
The simple monks the Christian's grave accord,
With lifted cross and swinging censer, glide
To passing bells—the hermits of the Lord;
And at that hour, in her own native vale,
Her own soft race their mystic loss bewail.
Methinks I see the Tuscan Genius yet,100
Lured, lingering by the clay it loved so well,
And listening to the two-fold dirge that met
In upper air;—here Nazarene anthems swell
Triumphal pæans!—there, the Alps behind,
Etrurian Næniæ,[12] load the lagging wind.
Pauses the startled genius to compare101
The notes that mourn the life, at best so brief,
With those that welcome to empyreal air
The bright escaper from a world of grief?
Marvelling what creed, beyond the happy vale,
Can teach the soul the loathèd Styx to hail!
THE ETRURIAN NÆNIÆ.
Where art thou, pale and melancholy ghost?
No funeral rites appease thy tombless clay;
Unburied, glidest thou by the dismal coast,
O exile from the day?
There, where the voice of love is heard no more,
Where the dull wave moans back the eternal wail,
Dost thou recall the summer suns of yore,
Thine own melodious vale?
Thy Lares stand on thy deserted floors,
And miss their last sweet daughter's holy face;
What hand shall wreathe with flowers the threshold doors?
What child renew the race?
Thine are the nuptials of the dreary shades,
Of all thy groves what rests?—the cypress tree!
As from the air a strain of music fades,
Dark silence buries thee!
Yet no, lost child of more than mortal sires,
Thy stranger bridegroom bears thee to his home,
Where the stars light the Æsars' nuptial fires
In Tina's azure dome;