Part I: Ancient and Modern Italy Compared

O my lamented Talbot! while with thee
The muse gay roved the glad Hesperian round,
And drew the inspiring breath of ancient arts;
Ah! little thought she her returning verse
Should sing our darling subject to thy shade.
And does the mystic veil, from mortal beam,
Involve those eyes where every virtue smiled,
And all thy father's candid spirit shone?
The light of reason, pure, without a cloud;
Full of the generous heart, the mild regard;
Honour disdaining blemish, cordial faith,
And limpid truth, that looks the very soul.
But to the death of mighty nations turn
My strain; be there absorbed the private tear.
Musing, I lay; warm from the sacred walks,
Where at each step imagination burns:
While scattered wide around, awful, and hoar,
Lies, a vast monument, once glorious Rome,
The tomb of empire! ruins! that efface
Whate'er, of finished, modern pomp can boast.
Snatched by these wonders to that world where thought
Unfettered ranges, fancy's magic hand
Led me anew o'er all the solemn scene,
Still in the mind's pure eye more solemn dressed:
When straight, methought, the fair majestic power
Of Liberty appeared. Not, as of old,
Extended in her hand the cap, and rod,
Whose slave-enlarging touch gave double life:
But her bright temples bound with British oak,
And naval honours nodded on her brow.
Sublime of port: loose o'er her shoulder flowed
Her sea-green robe, with constellations gay.
An island-goddess now; and her high care
The queen of isles, the mistress of the main.
My heart beat filial transport at the sight;
And, as she moved to speak, the awakened muse
Listened intense. Awhile she looked around,
With mournful eye the well-known ruins marked.
And then, her sighs repressing, thus began:
'Mine are these wonders, all thou seest is mine;
But ah, how changed! the falling poor remains
Of what exalted once the Ausonian shore.
Look back through time; and, rising from the gloom,
Mark the dread scene, that paints whate'er I say.
'The great republic see! that glowed, sublime,
With the mixed freedom of a thousand states;
Raised on the thrones of kings her curule chair,
And by her fasces awed the subject world.
See busy millions quickening all the land.
With cities thronged, and teeming culture high:
For nature then smiled on her free-born sons,
And poured the plenty that belongs to men.
Behold, the country cheering, villas rise
In lively prospect by the secret lapse
Of brooks now lost, and streams renowned in song;
In Umbria's closing vales, or on the brow
Of her brown hills that breathe the scented gale;
On Baia's viny coast, where peaceful seas,
Fanned by kind zephyrs, ever kiss the shore,
And suns unclouded shine, through purest air;
Or in the spacious neighbourhood of Rome,
Far shining upward to the Sabine hills.
To Anio's roar, and Tibur's olive shade,
To where Preneste lifts her airy brow,
Or downwards spreading to the sunny shore
Where Alba breathes the freshness of the main.
'See distant mountains leave their valleys dry,
And o'er the proud arcade their tribute pour,
To lave imperial Rome. For ages laid.
Deep, massy, firm, diverging every way,
With tombs of heroes sacred, see her roads —
By various nations trod and suppliant kings,
With legions flaming or with triumph gay.
'Full in the centre of these wondrous works,
The pride of earth! Rome in her glory see!
Behold her demigods, in senate met;
All head to counsel, and all heart to act:
The commonweal inspiring every tongue
With fervent eloquence, unbribed, and bold;
Ere tame corruption taught the servile herd
To rank obedient to a master's voice.
'Her forum see, warm, popular, and loud.
In trembling wonder hushed, when the two sires.
As they the private father greatly quelled.
Stood up the public fathers of the state.
See justice judging there, in human shape.
Hark! how with freedom's voice it thunders high,
Or in soft murmurs sinks to Tully's tongue.
'Her tribes, her census, see; her generous troops.
Whose pay was glory, and their best reward
Free for their country and for me to die;
Ere mercenary murder grew a trade.
'Mark, as the purple triumph waves along,
The highest pomp and lowest fall of life.
'Her festive games, the school of heroes, see;
Her circus, ardent with contending youth;
Her streets, her temples, palaces, and baths,
Full of fair forms, of beauty's eldest born.
And of a people cast in virtue's mould —
While sculpture lives around, and Asian hills
Lend their best stores to heave the pillared dome;
All that to Roman strength the softer touch
Of Grecian art can join. But language fails
To paint this sun, this centre of mankind;
Where every virtue, glory, treasure, art.
Attracted strong, in heightened lustre met.
'Need I the contrast mark? unjoyous view!
A land in all, in government and arts,
In virtue, genius, earth, and heaven, reversed.
Who but these far-famed ruins to behold,
Proofs of a people, whose heroic aims
Soared far above the little selfish sphere
Of doubting modern life — who but inflamed
With classic zeal, these consecrated scenes
Of men and deeds to trace, unhappy land!
Would trust thy wilds and cities loose of sway?
'Are these the vales that once exulting states
In their warm bosom fed? The mountains these,
On whose high-blooming sides my sons of old
I bred to glory? These dejected towns,
Where, mean and sordid, life can scarce subsist,
The scenes of ancient opulence and pomp?
'Come! by whatever sacred name disguised,
Oppression, come! and in thy works rejoice!
See nature's richest plains to putrid fens
Turned by thy fury. From their cheerful bounds,
See razed the enlivening village, farm, and seat.
First, Rural Toil, by thy rapacious hand
Robbed of his poor reward, resigned the plough;
And now he dares not turn the noxious glebe.
'Tis thine entire. The lonely swain himself,
Who loves at large along the grassy downs
His flocks to pasture, thy drear champaign flies
Far as the sickening eye can sweep around,
'Tis all one desert, desolate, and grey,
Grazed by the sullen buffalo alone;
And, where the rank uncultivated growth
Of rotting ages taints the passing gale,
Beneath the baleful blast the city pines,
Or sinks enfeebled, or infected bums.
Beneath it mourns the solitary road.
Rolled in rude mazes o'er the abandoned waste;
While ancient ways, ingulfed, are seen no more.
'Such thy dire plains, thou self -destroyer! foe
To humankind! Thy mountains, too, profuse
Where savage nature blooms, seem their sad plaint
To raise against thy desolating rod.
There on the breezy brow, where thriving states
And famous cities once to the pleased sun
Far other scenes of rising culture spread,
Pale shine thy ragged towns. Neglected round,
Each harvest pines; the livid, lean produce
Of heartless labour: while thy hated joys,
Not proper pleasure, lift the lazy hand.
Better to sink in sloth the woes of life.
Than wake their rage with unavailing toil.
Hence drooping art almost to nature leaves
The rude unguided year. Thin wave the gifts
Of yellow Ceres, thin the radiant blush
Of orchard reddens in the warmest ray.
To weedy wildness run, no rural wealth
(Such as dictators fed) the garden pours.
Crude the wild olive flows, and foul the vine;
Nor juice Caecubian nor Falernian more
Streams life and joy, save in the muse's bowl
Unseconded by art, the spinning race
Draw the bright thread in vain, and idly toil.
In vain, forlorn in wilds, the citron blows;
And flowering plants perfume the desert gale.
Through the vile thorn the tender myrtle twines.
Inglorious droops the laurel, dead to song,
And long a stranger to the hero's brow.
'Nor half thy triumph this: cast, from brute fields,
Into the haunts of men thy ruthless eye.
There buxom plenty never turns her horn;
The grace and virtue of exterior life,
No clean convenience reigns; even sleep itself
Least delicate of powers, reluctant there
Lays on the bed impure his heavy head.
Thy horrid walk! Dead, empty, unadorned,
See streets whose echoes never know the voice
Of cheerful hurry, commerce many-tongued,
And art mechanic at his various task
Fervent employed. Mark the desponding race,
Of occupation void, as void of hope;
Hope, the glad ray, glanced from Eternal Good,
That life enlivens, and exalts its powers.
With views of fortune — madness all to them!
By thee relentless seized their better joys.
To the soft aid of cordial airs they fly,
Breathing a kind oblivion o'er their woes,
And love and music melt their souls away.
From feeble Justice, see how rash Revenge,
Trembling, the balance snatches, and the sword,
Fearful himself, to venal ruffians gives.
See where God's altar, nursing murder, stands
With the red touch of dark assassins stained.
'But chief let Rome, the mighty city! speak
The full-exerted genius of thy reign.
Behold her rise amid the lifeless waste,
Expiring nature all corrupted round;
While the lone Tiber, through the desert plain,
Winds his waste stores, and sullen sweeps along.
Patched from my fragments, in unsolid pomp,
Mark how the temple glares; and, artful dressed,
Amusive draws the superstitious train.
Mark how the palace lifts a lying front.
Concealing often, in magnific jail,
Proud want; a deep unanimated gloom!
And oft adjoining to the drear abode
Of misery, whose melancholy walls
Seem its voracious grandeur to reproach.
Within the city bounds the desert see;
See the rank vine o'er subterranean roofs
Indecent spread; beneath whose fretted gold
It once exulting flowed. The people mark!
Matchless, while fired by me; to public good
Inexorably firm, just, generous, brave.
Afraid of nothing but unworthy life,
Elate with glory, an heroic soul
Known to the vulgar breast: behold them now
A thin despairing number, all-subdued,
The slaves of slaves, by superstition fooled,
By vice unmanned and a licentious rule.
In guile ingenious, and in murder brave.
Such in one land, beneath the same fair clime.
Thy sons. Oppression, are; and such were mine.
'Even with thy laboured pomp, for whose vain show
Deluded thousands starve — all age-begrimed.
Torn, robbed, and scattered in unnumbered sacks,
And by the tempest of two thousand years
Continual shaken, let my ruins vie —
These roads that yet the Roman hand assert,
Beyond the weak repair of modern toil;
These fractured arches, that the chiding stream
No more delighted hear; these rich remains
Of marbles now unknown, where shines imbibed
Each parent ray; these massy columns, hewed
From Afric's farthest shore; one granite all.
These obelisks high-towering to the sky,
Mysterious marked with dark Egyptian lore;
These endless wonders that this sacred way
Illumine still, and consecrate to fame;
These fountains, vases, urns, and statues, charged
With the fine stores of art-completing Greece.
Mine is, besides, thy every later boast —
Thy Buonarotis, thy Palladios mine;
And mine the fair designs which Raphael's soul.
O'er the live canvas emanating, breathed.
'What would you say, ye conquerors of earth!
Ye Romans! could you raise the laurelled head;
Could you the country see, by seas of blood
And the dread toil of ages won so dear.
Your pride, your triumph, your supreme delight!
For whose defence oft, in the doubtful hour,
You rush with rapture down the gulf of fate,
Of death ambitious! till by awful deeds.
Virtues, and courage that amaze mankind
The queen of nations rose; possessed of all
Which nature, art, and glory could bestow —
What would you say, deep in the last abyss
Of slavery, vice, and unambitious want.
Thus to behold her sunk? your crowded plains
Void of their cities; unadorned your hills;
Ungraced your lakes; your ports to ships unknown;
Your lawless floods and your abandoned streams —
These could you know, these could you love again?
Thy Tibur, Horace, could it now inspire
Content, poetic ease, and rural joy
Soon bursting into song — while through the groves
Of headlong Anio, dashing to the vale
In many a tortured stream, you mused along?
Yon wild retreat, where superstition dreams,
Could, Tully, you your Tusculum believe?
And could you deem yon naked hills, that form,
Famed in old song, the ship-forsaken bay.
Your Formian shore? Once the delight of earth.
Where art and nature, ever smiling, joined
On the gay land to lavish all their stores —
How changed, how vacant, Virgil, wide around,
Would now your Naples seem? disastered less
By black Vesuvius thundering o'er the coast
His midnight earthquakes and his mining fires
Than by despotic rage, that inward gnaws,
A native foe — a foreign, tears without.
First from your flattered Caesars this began:
Till, doomed to tyrants an eternal prey.
Thin peopled spreads at last the syren plain.
That the dire soul of Hannibal disarmed;
And wrapped in weeds the shore of Venus lies.
There Baia sees no more the joyous throng,
Her banks all beaming with the pride of Rome;
No generous vines now bask along the hills,
Where sport the breezes of the Tyrrhene main;
With baths and temples mixed, no villas rise,
Nor, art-sustained amid reluctant waves,
Draw the cool murmurs of the breathing deep;
No spreading ports their sacred arms extend;
No mighty moles the big intrusive storm.
From the calm station, roll resounding back.
An almost total desolation sits,
A dreary stillness, saddening o'er the coast,
Where, when soft suns and tepid winters rose,
Rejoicing crowds inhaled the balm of peace,
Where citied hill to hill reflected blaze,
And where with Ceres Bacchus wont to hold
A genial strife. Her youthful form robust
Even nature yields, by fire and earthquake rent —
Whole stately cities in the dark abrupt
Swallowed at once, or vile in rubbish laid,
A nest for serpents; from the red abyss
New hills explosive thrown; the Lucrine lake
A reedy pool; and all to Cuma's point
The sea recovering his usurped domain,
And poured triumphant o'er the buried dome.
'Hence, Britain, learn — my best established, last,
And, more than Greece or Rome, my steady reign;
The land where, king and people equal bound
By guardian laws, my fullest blessings flow.
And where my jealous unsubmitting soul,
The dread of tyrants! burns in every breast —
Learn hence, if such the miserable fate
Of an heroic race, the masters once
Of humankind, what, when deprived of me,
How grievous must be thine? In spite of climes.
Whose sun-enlivened ether wakes the soul
To higher powers; in spite of happy soils,
That, but by labour's slightest aid impelled.
With treasures teem, to thy cold clime unknown;
If there desponding fail the common arts
And sustenance of life, could life itself.
Far less a thoughtless tyrant's hollow pomp.
Subsist with thee? Against depressing skies.
Joined to full-spread oppression's cloudy brow,
How could thy spirits hold? where vigour find
Forced fruits to tear from their unnative soil,
Or, storing every harvest in thy ports,
To plough the dreadful all-producing wave? '
Here paused the Goddess. By the pause assured,
In trembling accents thus I moved my prayer:
'Oh first, and most benevolent of powers!
Come from eternal splendours, here on earth.
Against despotic pride and rage and lust.
To shield mankind; to raise them to assert
The native rights and honour of their race —
Teach me, thy lowest subject, but in zeal
Yielding to none, the progress of thy reign.
And with a strain from thee enrich the muse.
As thee alone she serves, her patron, thou.
And great inspirer be! then will she joy,
Though narrow life her lot, and private shade:
And, when her venal voice she barters vile
Or to thy open or thy secret foes.
May ne'er those sacred raptures touch her more,
By slavish hearts unfelt! and may her song
Sink in oblivion with the nameless crew,
Vermin of state! to thy o'erflowing light
That owe their being, yet betray thy cause.
Then, condescending kind, the heavenly Power
Returned: —' What here, suggested by the scene,
I slight unfold, record and sing at home.
In that blest isle, where (so we spirits move)
With one quick effort of my will I am.
There truth unlicensed walks; and dares accost
Even kings themselves, the monarchs of the free!
Fixed on my rock, there, an indulgent race
O'er Britons wield the sceptre of their choice;
And there, to finish what his sires began,
A Prince behold! for me who burns sincere,
Even with a subject's zeal. He my great work
Will parent-like sustain; and, added, give
The touch the graces and the muses owe.
For Britain's glory swells his panting breast,
And ancient arts he emulous revolves —
His pride to let the smiling heart abroad,
Through clouds of pomp, that but conceal the man;
To please his pleasure; bounty his delight;
And all the soul of Titus dwells in him.'
Hail, glorious theme! but how, alas! shall verse.
From the crude stores of mortal language drawn,
How faint and tedious, sing what, piercing deep,
The Goddess flashed at once upon my soul?
For, clear precision all, the tongue of gods
Is harmony itself; to every ear
Familiar known, like light to every eye.
Meantime disclosing ages, as she spoke.
In long succession poured their empires forth;
Scene after scene, the human drama spread;
And still the embodied picture rose to sight.
O thou! to whom the muses owe their flame;
Who bidd'st, beneath the pole, Parnassus rise.
And Hippocrene flow; with thy bold ease,
The striking force, the lightning of thy thought.
And thy strong phrase, that rolls profound and clear;
Oh, gracious Goddess! reinspire my song;
While I, to nobler than poetic fame
Aspiring, thy commands to Britons bear.