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LXXXIII.

The Vision changes-ages take their flight:

All, save the Temple, dream-like, now is flown:

The City's place is vanished from the sight:

One massive fragment from that shrine is thrown, One sits thereon of kingly mien, alone:

Deep lines of thought upon his brow appear:

The imperial toga hath the Roman shown:

He gazes on the answering Ruin ;—near

His silent courtiers wait-for dumb is flattery here!

LXXXIV.

It is Augustus Cæsar: it may be

Truth silently is entering his breast,

Filled with the wisdom of antiquity:

Those mighty spirits who their words impressed,
And works, upon mankind, now laid in rest,

Passed, yea, forgotten as the breeze that blew
Unheeded by him there! then, unrepressed,

A deeper gloom upon his forehead grew, Feeling how vainly Fame doth here our life renew.

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LXXXV.

He felt the Power presiding here, as thou :
Stern Mutability:-that Rome, his pride,
His boast, arrayed by him in marble now,
Might one day in the desert thus abide,
Bowed to the Fate she haughtily defied!
Her Forum-place, a solitude; the spot

Even where she stood-unknown: he turned aside:
The moral with his spirit's life was wrought;

Truth entered in his soul-her words were unforgot.

LXXXVI.

The Sun is setting: carrying Day before,

And leaving Night and Solitude behind:

Material god! and is the word-NO MORE

Stamped on thy blazing brow? shalt thou, enshrined

Soul of that infinite space, thy mandate find,

The irrevocable doom to be destroyed?

Or, art thou living like the Almighty Mind?

Thy beams decreed to lighten o'er the void

Where once our World of Life, thought, suffered, and

enjoyed!

LXXXVII.

Glorious idolatry of elder time!

God-like, or rising, throned, or in decline:

Where are those days when men, like gods, sublime, Bowed on their hills? yea, hallowed as divine

The Stars that drew their crowns of light from thine! They who beheld in thee the visible face

Of the INVISIBLE within his shrine:

What shrine was like thine Eye? what altar-place

Like thy all-infinite heaven-whose walls are echoless space?

LXXXVIII.

Lord of the Day! and being infinite,

That lives within thy beams-whose life thou art :

Creator of the Seasons-Eye of Light!

Thy rays pervade, like melody, the heart,
Till of their feeling it becomes a part:
Until all shapes that haunt our phantasy,
All forms of beauty into life that start,

Of glory, power, and of majesty,

Are drawn from thy bright Urn by treasuring Memory!

LXXXIX.

The blue Mediterranean bosoms thee:

Thy crown of many hues doth o'er her glow;
O thou glad rolling and rejoicing Sea!
Could I behold thy waters foaming now,

Nor all the rapture which thou giv'st, avow?
Thy bosom bears the azure of the Sky :
The breeze is playing o'er thy glorious brow!

The pulses of thy mighty Heart on high

Are heard like thunder-throbbing everlastingly!

XC.

Roll on for ever, wildly fresh and free!
Men raise their ant-hill cities on thy brink;
States, empires' rise and fall are typed by thee:
Time's dusty records in oblivion sink ;

And they, the lights that shone o'er ages, shrink
Again in darkness: deeds, and thoughts that bore
The stamps that to immortal natures link;

Unchanged alone thou roll'st from shore to shore,

Girding the earth like heaven-the same for evermore!

XCI.

And galaxied with Cyclades, whose names Enduring as the stars hath Memory kept: What glorious deeds each shore opposing claims! What patriots there even virtue overstepped; What baffled tyrants vainly there have wept, Checked in their game of slaughter unessayed, And, while thy Waves in thunder by them swept, Stood-even as children!-but thy Voice obeyed: "No further pass—even here shall thy proud course be stayed!"

XCII.

Thou mighty Being! vain are round thee reared
Earth's mountain walls, and ramparts of the sand,
That sunk beneath the irruption which they feared;

Thou, who hast made an Ocean of the land,
Whose Waters o'er a buried world expand!

What Mammoth-monsters, there, lie unconfessed!

Oh, in thy mystery alone how grand

Art thou!—the Almighty mirrored in thy breast:

The calm-the wrath—the thunder-the eternal rest!

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