ON THE PALATINE
I tread the vast deserted stage
Whereon the Caesars lived and died;
The relics of Rome's golden age
Lie strewn about me far and wide,
Mementoes of an empire's pride,
The homes of men once deified.
What are they now? Stupendous piles
Of mouldering corridors and walls,
On which alike the sunshine smiles
And cold the rain of winter falls;
A wilderness of roofless halls
Whose tragic history appalls!
Below me, like an opened grave,
The Forum's excavations lie,
Where column, arch and architrave
In solemn grandeur greet the eye,
Still guarding 'neath Italia's sky
The glory that can never die.
And here, above me and around,
In part still shrouded by the soil,
A stony chaos strews the ground,
Where patient students delve and toil
To bring to light Time's buried spoil,
And History's tangled threads uncoil.
Halt! where thou standest Rome was born!
These stones by Romulus were placed,
When, on that far-off April morn,
Two snow-white bulls the furrow traced
For Rome's first wall, which, firmly based,
Two thousand years have not effaced.
From these rude blocks how vast the bound
To that huge, labyrinthine mass
Through which the secret pathways wound,
Where emperors, if alarmed, could pass;
Yet even there could find, alas!
The poignard or the poisoned glass.
What ghastly crimes these rooms recall!
Here Nero watched his brother drain
The fatal draught, then lifeless fall;
Here, too, Caligula was slain,
When, shrieking, with disordered brain,
He pleaded for his life in vain.
At every turn some pallid ghost
With haggard features seems to rise
To join the long-drawn, murdered host
That moves with sad, averted eyes,
Like victims to a sacrifice,
To where the Via Sacra lies.
Behold the mighty Judgment Hall,
Where Nero with indifferent air
Remarked the pleading of St. Paul,
Nor dreamed the man before him there
Would soon be read and reverenced where
The Roman empire had no share!