A wail, a chant, louder and louder yet;
And now a strange fantastic troop appeared!
Thronging, they came-as from the shades below;
All of a ghostly white! "O, say!" I cried,
"Do not the living here bury the dead?

Do spirits come and fetch them? What are these,
That seem not of this world, and mock the day;
Each with a burning taper in his hand?"—
"It is an ancient Brotherhood thou seest.

Such their apparel. Through the long, long line,
Look where thou wilt, no likeness of a man;
The living masked, the dead alone uncovered.
But mark." And, lying on her funeral couch,
Like one asleep, her eyelids closed, her hands
Folded together on her modest breast,

As 't were her nightly posture, through the crowd
She came at last-and richly, gayly clad,
As for a birth-day feast! But breathes she not?
A glow is on her cheek and her lips move!
And now a smile is there - how heavenly sweet!
"O, no!" replied the dame, wiping her tears,
But with an accent less of grief than anger,
"No, she will never, never wake again!

Death, when we meet the spectre in our walks,
As we did yesterday and shall to-morrow,
Soon grows familiar-like most other things,
Seen, not observed; but in a foreign clime,
Changing his shape to something new and strange
(And through the world he changes as in sport,
Affect he greatness or humility),

Knocks at the heart. His form and fashion here To me, I do confess, reflect a gloom,

A sadness round; yet one I would not lose ;
Being in unison with all things else

In this, this land of shadows, where we live
More in past time than present, where the ground,
League beyond league, like one great cemetery,
Is covered o'er with mouldering monuments;
And, let the living wander where they will,
They cannot leave the footsteps of the dead.

Oft, where the burial-rite follows so fast
The agony, oft coming, nor from far,
Must a fond father meet his darling child
(Him who at parting climbed his knees and clung)
Clay-cold and wan, and to the bearers cry,

"Stand, I conjure ye!"

What are the greatest?

Seen thus destitute,

They must speak beyond

A thousand homilies. When RAPHAEL went,

239

His heavenly face the mirror of his mind,
His mind a temple for all lovely things
To flock to and inhabit- when he went,
Wrapt in his sable cloak, the cloak he wore,
To sleep beneath the venerable Dome,
By those attended, who in life had loved,
Had worshipped, following in his steps to Fame
('T was on an April day, when Nature smiles),
All Rome was there. But, ere the march began,
Ere to receive their charge the bearers came,
Who had not sought him? And when all beheld
Him, where he lay, how changed from yesterday,
Him in that hour cut off, and at his head

His last great work; 240 when, entering in, they looked
Now on the dead, then on that masterpiece,

241

Now on his face, lifeless and colorless,

Then on those forms divine that lived and breathed,

And would live on for ages

- all were moved;

And sighs burst forth, and loudest lamentations.

NATIONAL PREJUDICES.

"ANOTHER assassination! This venerable city," I exclaimed, "what is it, but as it began, a nest of robbers and murderers? We must away at sunrise, Luigi."— But before sunrise I had reflected a little, and in the soberest prose. My indignation was gone; and, when Luigi undrew my curtain, crying, "Up, signor, up! The horses are at the gate!" "Luigi," I replied, "if thou lovest me, draw the curtain." 242

It would lessen very much the severity with which men judge of each other, if they would but trace effects to their causes, and observe the progress of things in the moral as accurately as in the physical world. When we condemn millions in the mass as vindictive and sanguinary, we should remember that wherever justice is ill-administered the injured will redress themselves. Robbery provokes to robbery; murder to assassination. Resentments become hereditary; and what began in disorder ends as if all hell had broke loose.

Laws create a habit of self-restraint, not only by the influence of fear, but by regulating in its exercise the passion of revenge. If they overawe the bad by the prospect of a punishment certain and well-defined, they console the injured by the infliction of that punishment; and, as the infliction is a public act, it excites and entails no enmity.

The laws are offended; and the community for its own sake pursues and overtakes the offender, often without the concurrence of the sufferer, sometimes against his wishes.243

Now, those who were not born, like ourselves, to such advantages, we should, surely, rather pity than hate; and when, at length, they venture to turn against their rulers,244 we should lament, not wonder at, their excesses; remembering that nations are naturally patient and long-suffering, and seldom rise in rebellion till they are so degraded by a bad government as to be almost incapable of a good one.

"Hate them, perhaps," you may say, "we should not; but despise them we must, if enslaved, like the people of ROME, in mind as well as body; if their religion be a gross and barbarous superstition."-I respect knowledge; but I do not despise ignorance. They think only as their fathers thought, worship as they worshipped. They do no more; and, if ours had not burst their bondage, braving imprisonment and death, might not we at this very moment have been exhibiting, in our streets and our churches, the same processions, ceremonials, and mortifications?

Nor should we require from those who are in an earlier stage of society what belongs to a later. They are only where we once were; and why hold them in derision? It is their business to cultivate the inferior arts before they think of the more refined; and in many of the last what are we as a nation, when compared to others that have passed away? Unfortunately it is too much the practice of governments to nurse and keep alive in the governed their national prejudices. It withdraws their attention from what is passing at home, and makes them better tools in the hands of ambition. Hence, next-door neighbors are held up to us from our childhood as natural enemies; and we are urged on like curs to worry each other.24

243

In like manner we should learn to be just to individuals. Who can say, "In such circumstances I should have done otherwise?" Who, did he but reflect by what slow gradations, often by how many strange concurrences, we are led astray; with how much reluctance, how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many self-accusations, how many sighs, how many tears, who, did he but reflect for a moment, would have the heart to cast a stone? Happily these things are known to Him from whom no secrets are hidden; and let us rest in the assurance that His judgments

are not as ours are.

246

THE CAMPAGNA OF ROME.

247

HAVE none appeared as tillers of the ground,"
None since they went as though it still were theirs,
And they might come and claim their own again?
Was the last plough a Roman's?

From this seat,*

Sacred for ages, whence, as VIRGIL sings,
The Queen of Heaven, alighting from the sky,
Looked down and saw the armies in array,

249

248

Let us contemplate; and, where dreams from Jove
Descended on the sleeper, where, perhaps,
Some inspirations may be lingering still,
Some glimmerings of the future or the past,
Let us await their influence; silently

Revolving, as we rest on the green turf,

The changes from that hour when he from TROY
Came up the TIBER; when refulgent shields,
No strangers to the iron-hail of war,