1491

   As she who in some village-child unknown,
   With rustic grace and fantasy bedeck’d
   And in her simple loveliness alone,
   A sister finds;—­and the long years’ neglect
   Effaces with warm love and nursing care,
      And takes her heart to heart,
And in her treasured treasures bids her freely share,

   And robes with radiance new, new strength and grace:—­
   Hellas and England! thus it was with ye! 
   Though distanced far by centuries and by space,
   Sisters in soul by Nature’s own decree. 
   And if on Athens in her glory-day
      The younger might not look,
Her living soul came back, and reinfused our clay.

   —­It was not wholly lost, that better light,
   Not in the darkest darkness of our day;
   From cell to cell, e’en through the Danish night,
   The torch ran on its firefly fitful way;
   And blazed anew with him who in the vale
      Of fair Aosta saw
The careless reaper-bands, and pass’d the heavens’ high pale,

   And supp’d with God, in vision!  Or with him,
   Earliest and greatest of his name, who gave
   His life to Nature, in her caverns dim
   Tracking her soul, through poverty to the grave,
   And left his Great Work to the barbarous age
      That, in its folly-love,
With wizard-fame defamed his and sweet Vergil’s page.

   But systems have their day, and die, or change
   Transform’d to new:  Not now from cloister-cell
   And desk-bow’d priest, breathes out that impulse strange
   ’Neath which the world of feudal Europe fell:—­
   Throes of new birth, new life; while men despair’d
      Or triumph’d in their pride,
As in their eyes the torch of learning fiercely flared.

   For now the cry of Homer’s clarion first
   And Plato’s golden tongue on English ears
   And souls aflame for that new doctrine burst,
   As Grocyn taught, when, after studious years,
   He came from Arno to the liberal walls
      That welcomed me in youth,
And nursed in Grecian lore, long native to her halls.

   O voice that spann’d the gulf of vanish’d years,
   Evoking shapes of old from night to light,
   Lo at thy spell a long-lost world appears,
   Where Rome and Hellas break upon our sight:—­
   The Gothic gloom divides; a glory burns
      Behind the clouds of Time,
And all that wonder-past in beauty’s glow returns.

   —­For when the Northern floods that lash’d and curl’d
   Around the granite fragments of great Rome
   Outspread Colossus-like athwart the world,
   Foam’d down, and the new nations found their home,
   That earlier Europe, law and arts and arms,
      Fell into far-off shade,
Or lay like some fair maid sleep-sunk in magic charms.