Full swells the deep pure fountain
of young life,
Where on the heart and from
the heart we took
Our first and sweetest nurture,
when the wife,
Blest into mother, in the innocent
look,
Or even the piping cry of lips that
brook
No pain and small suspense, a joy
perceives
Man knows not, when from out its
cradled nook
She sees her little bud put forth
its leaves —
What may the fruit be yet?—I know not—Cain
was Eve’s.
CL.
But here youth offers to old age
the food,
The milk of his own gift: —it
is her sire
To whom she renders back the debt
of blood
Born with her birth. No; he
shall not expire
While in those warm and lovely veins
the fire
Of health and holy feeling can provide
Great Nature’s Nile, whose
deep stream rises higher
Than Egypt’s river: —from
that gentle side
Drink, drink and live, old man! heaven’s realm
holds no such tide.
CLI.
The starry fable of the milky way
Has not thy story’s purity;
it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more
in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the
abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds:
—Oh, holiest nurse!
No drop of that clear stream its
way shall miss
To thy sire’s heart, replenishing
its source
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe.
CLII.
Turn to the mole which Hadrian reared
on high,
Imperial mimic of old Egypt’s
piles,
Colossal copyist of deformity,
Whose travelled phantasy from the
far Nile’s
Enormous model, doomed the artist’s
toils
To build for giants, and for his
vain earth,
His shrunken ashes, raise this dome:
How smiles
The gazer’s eye with philosophic
mirth,
To view the huge design which sprung from such a birth!
CLIII.
But lo! the dome—the
vast and wondrous dome,
To which Diana’s marvel was
a cell—
Christ’s mighty shrine above
his martyr’s tomb!
I have beheld the Ephesian’s
miracle—
Its columns strew the wilderness,
and dwell
The hyaena and the jackal in their
shade;
I have beheld Sophia’s bright
roofs swell
Their glittering mass i’ the
sun, and have surveyed
Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem prayed;
CLIV.
But thou, of temples old, or altars
new,
Standest alone—with nothing
like to thee —
Worthiest of God, the holy and the
true,
Since Zion’s desolation, when
that he
Forsook his former city, what could
be,
Of earthly structures, in his honour
piled,
Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty,
Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty,
all are aisled
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled.