Tier upon tier, Hesperian fruits arise;
The hanging bowers of this soft Babylon;
An India mellows in the Lombard skies,
And changelings, stolen from the Lybian sun,
Smile to yon Alps of snow.
II.
Amid this gentlest dream-land of the wave,
Arrested, stood the wondrous Corsican;
As if one glimpse the better angel gave
Of the bright garden-life vouschafed to man
Ere blood defiled the world.
He stood—that grand Sesostris of the North—
While paused the car to which were harness'd kings;
And in the airs, that lovingly sigh'd forth
The balms of Araby, his eagle-wings
Their sullen thunder furl'd.
III.
And o'er the marble hush of those large brows,
Dread with the awe of the Olympian nod,
A giant laurel spread its breathless boughs,
The prophet-tree of the dark Pythian god,
Shadowing the doom of thrones!
What, in such hour of rest and scene of joy,
Stirs in the cells of that unfathom'd brain?
Comes back one memory of the musing boy,
Lone gazing o'er the yet unmeasured main,
Whose waifs are human bones?
IV.
To those deep eyes doth one soft dream return?
Soft with the bloom of youth's unrifled spring,
When Hope first fills from founts divine the urn,
And rapt Ambition, on the angel's wing,
Floats first through golden air?
Or doth that smile recall the midnight street,
When thine own star the solemn ray denied,
And to a stage-mime,[A] for obscure retreat
From hungry Want, the destined Cæsar sigh'd?—
Still Fate, as then, asks prayer.