Classic Poem

Here slumbers Rome, among her broken tombs,
A funeral highway stretching down the past,
With few inscriptions, save the constant blooms
By kindly Nature on these altars cast.

The dust of glory all around me lies,
The ashes of dead nations and their kings:
I hear no voice save what from out the skies
The lark shakes down from his invisible wings.

Where slept a Caesar, now the owlet hides —
A silent spirit till the day has fled:
Here gleams the lizard, there the viper glides —
The steadfast guests of the patrician dead.

A funeral aspect fills the whole campaign —
Their tomb-like flocks the distant mounds disclose:
Like scattered blocks of granite on the plain,
The dove-hued oxen Virgil sang repose.

The cities seated on surrounding mounts,
Or what were cities, glimmer on the steeps
Like cemeteries, and the fancy counts
In vain their dead for whom no mortal weeps.

Caecilia's Tomb looks west to Hadrian's Mole
In widowed silence: eastward, nameless, gray,
Stripped of her marble art-embellished stole,
The matron Mausoleum of the Way.

Sits with her crown of olives, robbed of all
Save meek endurance and her vernal dome:
Her grandeur tells of Rome before its fall.
Her shattered splendor speaks of modern Rome.

The broken masses quarried from her base
To house a boor upon her head are thrust,
Where dreamful sloth looks down upon the race
Of heroes gone to history and dust.

All Rome to-day sits on the buried past,
Her later walls with sculptured blocks are flecked:
The spoilers toiled for ages fierce and fast,
Then left the rest to ruin and neglect.

And still beneath their tread what wonders lie! —
Brave statues of the godlike and their gods,
And columns that might corridor the sky,
While scarce a spade upturns the shallow clods.

Unearth their marble wonders, with their high
Immortal lessons, to awake men here
And elsewhere to arrest, as they sweep by,
Ambition's armies in their mad career.

Who to their chariots chain the fiery team
Of elements to gain the realms of gold,
Let them behold the more enduring dream.
Of Amphion-sculptors in the days of old.

Exhume these silent teachers from the dust,
And then — But hold! I see around me strewn,
O'er miles and miles of ruins, a thick crust
Of shattered remnants in dark ages hewn

For wanton pastime or for kilns of lime!
The very mortar in St. Peter's wall
Hath had its votaries in that grand old time
When Poesy and Art o'erlorded all.

But that is past. What sound is this I hear
More than the lark's? As from a mournful lyre
A weird, complaining murmur fills my ear:
I look above, and, lo! the aeolian wire

Sings in the wind. It is the lightning's track
Stretching o'er sepulchres, which serve for posts;
And yonder the swift train weaves forth and back.
Thou highway of the dead! where are thy ghosts?

The electric fire that reaches Rome to-day
May give at best a poor galvanic thrill —
The train that streams along the iron way
May bring but mourners to the sevenfold hill:

All this may be, but still within me burns
The prayerful dream and hope that even I
May see her rise above her funeral urns,
And throw her long-worn sackcloth bravely by.

There is a sad necropolis in the heart,
A street of buried loves and joys and dreams,
Where nest the night-owls, which will not depart,
But hide the deeper when the daylight beams.

And if a bird of hope sings overhead,
Wooing to pleasures near or far away,
They only wait the darkened hour to spread
Their secret wings and swoop upon their prey.

With many sighs breathed o'er these funeral heaps
I sit like Marius — not above the wall
Of ruined greatness, but my spirit weeps
O'er shattered fanes, where few are left to fall.

There are to whom whole days of light are given,
And fruitful seasons of unclouded joy,
But not to me since through my childhood's heaven
I wandered out a songful-hearted boy,

Seeking the unscythed orchard with the bees —
A little taller than the clover then.
With light hair blown like wings upon the breeze —
Long ere I knew the stubble-world of men.

But this is vain; and yet the heart will sigh,
At times adown her dark sepulchral way,
Even when, as now, without a cloud the sky
Is full of song that glorifies the day.

And surely on these shrines of pain and care
Some chords of pleasure, stretching from abroad,
Reach to the soul's deep citadel, and there
Bring messages of progress, peace, and God!

Thus there is good in all, and over all,
And e'en 'mid tombs some pleasure finds a place;
And sympathies, that followed from our fall.
On scenes like this may shed a soothing grace.

So, 'mid these tumuli of long-gone years,
A fruitful sadness on the spirit beams —
A calm content to lie where all are peers
When called, and sleep that sleep which knows no dreams.

It matters little where our dust is laid;
But if there be a choice beneath the dome
Of heaven's high temple, lay me in the shade
Of cypress boughs which guard the dead in Rome.

And yet I love my country none the less:
My faith fulfils her prophet's grandest dream,
And when death wooes me to his cold caress,
My hovering soul shall watch her course, supreme

In spite of traitors and ambitious fools,
Who threaten ruin to our soaring towers!
The Master-Builder works with many tools
When he erects a building such as ours.

Who would destroy to profit by the spoils
Are sturdy laborers in the eye of God:
The mad aspirant on his ladder toils,
Forgetting that he also bears a hod.

The great and good have bled to make us free:
Our rainbow banner, by their hands unfurled,
Waves o'er the new-born nation, yet to be
The mother of a liberated world.

Her Appian Way shall be the road to Fame,
And lined with many a Christian spire and dome:
Her arch triumphal, reared in Freedom's name,
Shall lead mankind to nobler marts than Rome!