Often an early King or Queen,

      And storied hero onward, knew his sheen;

         ’Twas glimpsed by Wolfe, by Ney anon,

         And Nelson on his blue demesne.

         But new light spread.  That god’s gold nimb

      And blazon have waned dimmer and more dim;

         Even his flushed form begins to fade,

         Till but a shade is left of him.

         That modern meditation broke

      His spell, that penmen’s pleadings dealt a stroke,

         Say some; and some that crimes too dire

         Did much to mire his crimson cloak.

         Yea, seeds of crescive sympathy

      Were sown by those more excellent than he,

         Long known, though long contemned till then —

         The gods of men in amity.

         Souls have grown seers, and thought out-brings

      The mournful many-sidedness of things

         With foes as friends, enfeebling ires

         And fury-fires by gaingivings!

         He scarce impassions champions now;

      They do and dare, but tensely – pale of brow;

         And would they fain uplift the arm

         Of that faint form they know not how.

         Yet wars arise, though zest grows cold;

      Wherefore, at whiles, as ’twere in ancient mould

         He looms, bepatched with paint and lath;

         But never hath he seemed the old!

         Let men rejoice, let men deplore.

      The lurid Deity of heretofore

         Succumbs to one of saner nod;

         The Battle-god is god no more.

         O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea,

         Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee

      When from Torino’s track I saw thy face first flash on me.

         And multimarbled Genova the Proud,

         Gleam all unconscious how, wide-lipped, up-browed,

      I first beheld thee clad – not as the Beauty but the Dowd.

         Out from a deep-delved way my vision lit

         On housebacks pink, green, ochreous – where a slit

      Shoreward ’twixt row and row revealed the classic blue through it.

         And thereacross waved fishwives’ high-hung smocks,

         Chrome kerchiefs, scarlet hose, darned underfrocks;

      Since when too oft my dreams of thee, O Queen, that frippery mocks:

         Whereat I grieve, Superba!.. Afterhours

         Within Palazzo Doria’s orange bowers

      Went far to mend these marrings of thy soul-subliming powers.

         But, Queen, such squalid undress none should see,

         Those dream-endangering eyewounds no more be

      Where lovers first behold thy form in pilgrimage to thee.

      Somewhere afield here something lies

      In Earth’s oblivious eyeless trust

      That moved a poet to prophecies —

      A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust

      The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,

      And made immortal through times to be; —

      Though it only lived like another bird,

      And knew not its immortality.

      Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell —

      A little ball of feather and bone;

      And how it perished, when piped farewell,

      And where it wastes, are alike unknown.

      Maybe it rests in the loam I view,

      Maybe it throbs in a myrtle’s green,

      Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue

      Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.

      Go find it, faeries, go and find

      That tiny pinch of priceless dust,

      And bring a casket silver-lined,

      And framed of gold that gems encrust;

      And we will lay it safe therein,

      And consecrate it to endless time;

      For it inspired a bard to win

      Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.

      I traced the Circus whose gray stones incline

      Where Rome and dim Etruria interjoin,

      Till came a child who showed an ancient coin

      That bore the image of a Constantine.

      She lightly passed; nor did she once opine

      How, better than all books, she had raised for me

      In swift perspective Europe’s history

      Through the vast years of Cæsar’s sceptred line.

      For in my distant plot of English loam

      ’Twas but to delve, and straightway there to find

      Coins of like impress.  As with one half blind

      Whom common simples cure, her act flashed home

      In that mute moment to my opened mind

      The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome.

      We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,

      And passed to Livia’s rich red mural show,

      Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico,

      We gained Caligula’s dissolving pile.

      And each ranked ruin tended to beguile

      The outer sense, and shape itself as though

      It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow

      Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle.

      When