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A firmament of purple light,
Which in the dark earth lay,

More boundless than the depth of night,

And purer than the day;

In which the lovely forests grew,

As in the upper air,

More perfect both in shape and hue
Than any spreading there.

There lay the glade and neighbouring lawn,
And through the dark green wood

The white sun twinkling like the dawn

Out of speckled cloud.

Sweet views, which in our world above
Can never well be seen,
Were imaged by the water's love
Of that fair forest green.

And all was interfused beneath
With an Elysian glow,

An atmosphere without a breath,

A softer day below.

Like one beloved the scene had lent

To the dark water's breast

Its every leaf and lineament

With more than truth exprest, Until an envious wind crept by,

Like an unwelcome thought,

Which from the mind's too faithful eye

Blots one dear image out.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

THE CAMP SANTO AT PISA

I

THERE needs not choral song, nor organ's

-

pealing:

This mighty cloister of itself inspires

Thoughts breathed like hymns from spiritual

choirs;

While shades and lights, in soft succession stealing Along it creep, now veiling, now revealing

Strange forms, here traced by painting's earliest sires,

Angels with palms; and purgatorial fires;

And saints caught up, and demons round them

reeling.

Love, long remembering those she could not save, Here hung the cradle of Italian Art:

Faith rocked it: like a hermit child went forth From hence that power which beautified the earth. She perished when the world had lured her heart From her true friends, Religion and the Grave.

II

Lament not thou: the cold winds, as they pass

Through the ribbed fretwork with low sigh or

moan,

Lament enough: let them lament alone,

Counting the sere leaves of the innumerous grass

With thin, soft sound like one prolonged,―alas! Spread thou thy hands on sun-touched vase, or stone

That yet retains the warmth of sunshine gone,
And drink warm solace from the ponderous mass.
Gaze not around thee. Monumental marbles,
Time-clouded frescos, mouldering year by year,
Dim cells in which all day the night-bird warbles,
These things are sorrowful elsewhere, not here:
A mightier Power than Art's hath here her shrine:
Stranger! thou tread'st the soil of Palestine!
AUBREY DE VERE.

CAMPANILE DI PISA

SNOW was glistening on the mountains, but the air was that of June;

Leaves were falling, but the runnels playing still their summer tune,

And the dial's lazy shadow hovered nigh the brink

of noon.

On the benches in the market rows of languid idlers lay,

When to Pisa's nodding belfry, with a friend, I

[blocks in formation]

From the top we looked around us, and as far as eye might strain,

Saw no sign of life or motion in the town or on the plain.

Hardly seemed the river moving, through the willows to the main;

Nor was any noise disturbing Pisa from her drowsy hour,

Save the doves that fluttered 'neath us, in and out and round the tower.

Not a shout from gladsome children, or the clatter of a wheel,

Nor the spinner of the suburb, winding his discordant reel,

Nor the stroke upon the pavement of a hoof or of a heel.

Even the slumberers in the churchyard of the Campo Santo seemed

Scarce more quiet than the living world that underneath us dreamed.

Dozing at the city's portal, heedless guard the sentry kept,

More than Oriental dulness o'er the sunny farms

had crept,

Near the walls the ducal herdsman by the dusty roadside slept;

While his camels, resting round him, half alarmed the sullen ox,

Seeing those Arabian monsters pasturing with Etruria's flocks.

Then it was, like one who wandered, lately, singing by the Rhine,

Strains perchance to maiden's hearing sweeter than this verse of mine,

That we bade Imagination lift us on her wing

divine,

And the days of Pisa's greatness rose from the sepulchral past,

When a thousand conquering galleys bore her standard at the mast.

Memory for a moment crowned her sovereign mistress of the seas,

When she braved, upon the billows, Venice and the Genoese,

Daring to deride the Pontiff, though he shook his angry keys.

When her admirals triumphant, riding o'er the Soldan's waves,

Brought from Calvary's holy mountain fitting soil for knightly graves.

When the Saracen surrendered, one by one, his pirate isles,

And Ionia's marbled trophies decked Lungarno's Gothic piles,

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