Oh! not for baneful self-complacency,
Not for the setting up our present selves
To triumph o’er our past (worst pride of all),
May we compare this present with that past;
But to provoke renewed acknowledgments,
But to incite unto an earnest hope
For all our brethren. And how should I fear
To own to thee that this is in my heart—
This longing, that it leads me home to-day,
Glad even while I turn my back on Rome,
Yet half unseen—its arts, its memories,
Its glorious fellowship of living men;
Glad in the hope to tread the soil again
Of England, where our place of duty lies:
Not as altho’ we thought we could do much,
Or claimed large sphere of action for ourselves;
Not in this thought—since rather be it ours,
Both thine and mine, to cultivate that frame
Of spirit, when we know and deeply feel
How little we can do, and yet do that.
TASSO’S DUNGEON, FERRARA.
How might the goaded sufferer in this cell,
With nothing upon which his eyes might fall,
Except this vacant court, that dreary wall,
How might he live? I asked. Here doomed to dwell,
I marvel how at all he could repel
Thoughts which to madness and despair would call.
Enter this vault—the bare sight will appal
Thy spirit, even as mine within me fell,
Until I learned that wall not always there
Had stood—’twas something that this iron grate
Once had looked out upon a garden fair.
There must have been then here, to calm his brain,
Green leaves, and flowers, and sunshine—and a weight
Fell from me, and my heart revived again.
SONNET.
It may be that our homeward longings made
That other lands were judged with partial eyes;
But fairer in my sight the mottled skies,
With pleasant interchange of sun and shade,
And more desired the meadow and deep glade
Of sylvan England, green with frequent showers,
Than all the beauty which the vaunted bowers
Of the parched South have in mine eyes displayed;
Fairer and more desired—this well might be:
For let the South have beauty’s utmost dower,
And yet my heart might well have turned to thee,
My home, my country, when a delicate flower
Within thy pleasant borders was for me
Tended, and growing up thro’ sun and shower.
AT BRUNECKEN, IN THE TYROL.
The men who for this earthly life would claim
Well nigh the whole, and if the work of heaven
Be relegated to one day in seven,
Account the other six may without blame,
Unsanctified by one diviner aim,
To self to mammon and the world be given,
These scanty worshippers might nigh be driven,
Were they but here, to profitable shame.
This eve, the closing of no festal day,
This common work-day eve, in the open street
Seen have I groups of happy people meet,
Putting for this their toil and tasks away,
Men, women, boys, at one rude shrine to pray,
And there their fervent litanies repeat.