But over all the rest supreme,
  The star of stars, the cynosure,
The artist’s and the poet’s theme,
The young man’s vision, the old man’s dream,—­
Granada by its winding stream,
  The city of the Moor!

And there the Alhambra still recalls
  Aladdin’s palace of delight;
Allah il Allah! through its halls
Whispers the fountain as it falls,
The Darro darts beneath its walls,
  The hills with snow are white.

Ah yes, the hills are white with snow,
  And cold with blasts that bite and freeze;
But in the happy vale below
The orange and pomegranate grow,
And wafts of air toss to and fro
  The blossoming almond-trees.

The Vega cleft by the Xenil,
  The fascination and allure
Of the sweet landscape chains the will;
The traveller lingers on the hill,
His parted lips are breathing still
  The last sigh of the Moor.

How like a ruin overgrown
  With flower’s that hide the rents of time,
Stands now the Past that I have known,
Castles in Spain, not built of stone
But of white summer clouds, and blown
  Into this little mist of rhyme!

VITTORIA COLONNA.

VITTORIA COLONNA, on the death of her hushand, the Marchese di Pescara, retired to her castle at Ischia (Inarime), and there wrote the Ode upon his death, which gained her the title of Divine.

Once more, once more, Inarime,
  I see thy purple hills!—­once more
I hear the billows of the bay
  Wash the white pebbles on thy shore.

High o’er the sea-surge and the sands,
  Like a great galleon wrecked and cast
Ashore by storms, thy castle stands,
  A mouldering landmark of the Past.

Upon its terrace-walk I see
  A phantom gliding to and fro;
It is Colonna,—­it is she
  Who lived and loved so long ago.

Pescara’s beautiful young wife,
  The type of perfect womanhood,
Whose life was love, the life of life,
  That time and change and death withstood.

For death, that breaks the marriage band
  In others, only closer pressed
The wedding-ring upon her hand
  And closer locked and barred her breast.

She knew the life-long martyrdom,
  The weariness, the endless pain
Of waiting for some one to come
  Who nevermore would come again.

The shadows of the chestnut-trees,
  The odor of the orange blooms,
The song of birds, and, more than these,
  The silence of deserted rooms;

The respiration of the sea,
  The soft caresses of the air,
All things in nature seemed to be
  But ministers of her despair;

Till the o’erburdened heart, so long
  Imprisoned in itself, found vent
And voice in one impassioned song
  Of inconsolable lament.

Then as the sun, though hidden from sight,
  Transmutes to gold the leaden mist,
Her life was interfused with light,
  From realms that, though unseen, exist,