XCIV.

More touching, than when in its youthful prime

It claimed, and won from rival shrines the prize :
Oh! what a magic lends the touch of Time!
How the o'erflowing feelings sympathise

With what we are, or shall be, while our eyes
Turn to the forms of beauty which have been!
We clothe the wreck with our humanities,
Until decay itself no more is seen,

Hued by the loving heart with an eternal green.

XCV.

And, while the resting eye dwells there, the mind

Calls up the spirits of the mighty dead,

Who once beside those pediments reclined;

Screened from the sun by the long shadows spread

From their Corinthian columns; they are fled

With countless ages: still eternal seem

Those capitals, yon fall of waters sped;

Alas, for man! for there, in power supreme,

Augustus gazed, as thou, upon yon rushing stream;

XCVI.

And Virgil-Horace-sate by either side;
While their perfumed Mecænas wiled in gay
And social talk the hours as now they glide;
Sporting the jest, perchance, in careless play,
Which others made whose life was yesterday!
Alas, for him who feels the sweet belief

To be remembered ever!-turn away:

Be not this haunt profaned with idle grief,

But learned the lessons taught us in life's span so brief.

XCVII.

Or, would'st thou choose a spot where gentler Nature

Awes not as here, but woos thee in her guise

Of Syren beauty; where her every feature

Breathes speaking tenderness, and where her sighs

Fill the live air with vocal melodies,

And the rapt bosom with that love profound
Which joins the Universe in holy ties;

Turn, where beside yon low hill's mural mound,

The wrecks of Hadrian's villa beautify the ground.

XCVIII.

Retreat of tired ambition satiate;

The world's dull stage or left in hate, or scorn
Of the crowd's senseless clamours, that await
Victor or vanquished, which on either fawn;
When the far distant goal to which are borne
Ambition's aching eyes, at last, is gained,

For what?-to pause for rest-to see the dawn

Of truth first break: nerves shattered-strength o'er

strained,

Such the rewards which wait Power's worthless prize

attained.

XCIX.

And in that nook, howe'er concealed, be sure

The natural bias of the heart is known:

The pride, or vanities that still endure;

Or the mind's first simplicity is shown,

Ere called to ripen rankly on a throne

Passions and crimes that else had been untaught:

So rises then the cell, or hall of stone,

True emblem of the inner mind, each brought

To mate with solitude, to court, or fly from thought.

C.

But Hadrian's vanity this spot endeared :
A city in one villa stood enshrined:

All objects of all foreign climes upreared,
In one vast labyrinth confusedly joined;
The theatre-arena-bath-combined;
Lo-through yon narrow vale the Peneus ran,
Taught through Thessalian Tempè's woods to wind!
Even Nature here was travestied by man;

Art racked-invention toiled-to crowd life's narrow

span.

CI.

Lo-in this Hall, where sophists met, and spent

In aimless disputation the long hours,

A race, as frail as they and impotent,

Teaching far deeper lessons-those sweet flowers!

Than e'er were culled in Academic bowers;

Oh! who can reach their moral? who can look

On them, nor feel their purity o'erpowers?

Who reads not in their hues, as in a book,

How He, their Maker, these the glorious chaplet took,

CII.

Arraying the fair-haired Earth with them, to be
A shrine of peace: in their brief life to prove
Man's birth, and death, and immortality;

And therefore hath that hand Almighty wove
In braided wreaths the starry hosts above:
Oh, then for ever be man's blessing given

To those mute harbingers of hope and love!

Those witnesses, that, crushed to earth and riven,

For ever spring from dust, and turn their eyes to heaven!

CIII.

Haunt of the Earth, where Paradise once more

To the eye opens its refulgent ray,

The last rich gleam from Eden's closing door!—

How more than all enshrined by phantasy

Of bowers in star-lit glades of Arcady,

Haunt of heroic forms and gods of old;

How more than opened o'er yon Western Sky,

Where the red clouds are round their day-god rolled,

Doth this Hesperian garden to the

eye

unfold