Through Italy with the Poets

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Moffat, Yard & Company, 1908 - British - 429 pages

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Page 171 - The roar of waters ! — from the headlong height Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice; The fall of waters ! rapid as the light The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss ; The hell of waters ! where they howl and hiss, And boil in endless torture ; while the sweat Of their great agony, wrung out from this Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set, LXX.
Page 378 - I STOOD in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand : I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand...
Page 235 - But meanwhile axe and lever Have manfully been plied; And now the bridge hangs tottering Above the boiling tide. " Come back, come back, Horatius !
Page 227 - Or view the Lord of the unerring bow, The God of life, and poesy, and light — The Sun in human limbs array'd, and brow All radiant from his triumph in the fight, The shaft hath just been shot — the arrow bright With an immortal's vengeance ; in his eye And nostril beautiful disdain, and might And majesty, flash their full lightnings by, Developing in that one glance the Deity.
Page 226 - Or, turning to the Vatican, go see Laocoon's torture dignifying pain — A father's love and mortal's agony With an immortal's patience blending : — Vain The struggle ; vain, against the coiling strain And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp, The old man's clench ; the long envenomed chain Rivets the living links, — the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.
Page 289 - I see the deep's untrampled floor With green and purple sea-weeds strown ; I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown...
Page 239 - They gave him of the corn-land, That was of public right, As much as two strong oxen Could plough from morn till night ; And they made a molten image, And set it up on high, And there it stands unto this day To witness if I lie.
Page 397 - What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions — "Must we die?" Those commiserating sevenths — "Life might last! we can but try!" "Were you happy?"— "Yes."— "And are you still as happy?"— "Yes.
Page 419 - I RODE one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice : a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds, Is this ; an uninhabited sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons ; and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand...
Page 201 - Arches on arches ! as it were that Rome. Collecting the chief trophies of her line, Would build up all her triumphs in one dome, Her Coliseum stands ; the moonbeams shine As 'twere its natural torches, for divine Should be the light which streams here to illume This long-explored but still exhaustless mine Of contemplation...

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