The Works of Lord Byron Volume II Part 66

Shrine of all saints and temple of all G.o.ds, From Jove to Jesus--spared and blest by Time-- Looking tranquillity, while falls or nods Arch--empire--each thing round thee--and Man plods His way through thorns to ashes--glorious Dome!

Shalt thou not last? Time's scythe and Tyrants' rods Shiver upon thee--sanctuary and home Of Art and Piety--Pantheon!--pride of Rome![pc]

CXLVII.

Relic of n.o.bler days, and n.o.blest arts!

Despoiled yet perfect! with thy circle spreads A holiness appealing to all hearts; To Art a model--and to him who treads Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds Her light through thy sole aperture; to those Who worship, here are altars for their beads-- And they who feel for Genius may repose Their eyes on honoured forms, whose busts around them close.[515]

CXLVIII.

There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light[516]

What do I gaze on? Nothing--Look again!

Two forms are slowly shadowed on my sight-- Two insulated phantoms of the brain:[pd]

It is not so--I see them full and plain-- An old man, and a female young and fair, Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose vein The blood is nectar:--but what doth she there, With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?[pe]

CXLIX.

Full swells the deep pure fountain of young life, Where _on_ the heart and _from_ the heart we took Our first and sweetest nurture--when the wife, Blest into mother, in the innocent look, Or even the piping cry of lips that brook[pf]

No pain and small suspense, a joy perceives[pg]

Man knows not--when from out its cradled nook She sees her little bud put forth its leaves-- What may the fruit be yet?--I know not--Cain was Eve's.

CL.

But here Youth offers to Old Age the food, The milk of his own gift: it is her Sire To whom she renders back the debt of blood Born with her birth:--No--he shall not expire While in those warm and lovely veins the fire Of health and holy feeling can provide Great Nature's Nile, whose deep stream rises higher Than Egypt's river:--from that gentle side Drink--drink, and live--Old Man! Heaven's realm holds no such tide.

CLI.

The starry fable of the Milky Way[517]

Has not thy story's purity; it is A constellation of a sweeter ray, And sacred Nature triumphs more in this Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss Where sparkle distant worlds:--Oh, holiest Nurse!

No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss To thy Sire's heart, replenishing its source[ph]

With life, as our freed souls rejoin the Universe.

CLII.

Turn to the Mole[518] which Hadrian reared on high, Imperial mimic of old Egypt's piles, Colossal copyist of deformity-- Whose travelled phantasy from the far Nile's Enormous model, doomed the artist's toils To build for Giants, and for his vain earth, His shrunken ashes, raise this Dome: How smiles The gazer's eye with philosophic mirth,[pi]

To view the huge design which sprung from such a birth!

CLIII.[519]

But lo! the Dome--the vast and wondrous Dome,[pj][520]

To which Diana's marvel was a cell-- Christ's mighty shrine above His martyr's tomb![pk]

I have beheld the Ephesian's miracle--[521]

Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell The hyaena and the jackal in their shade;[522]

I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell[pl]

Their glittering ma.s.s i' the Sun, and have surveyed[pm]

Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem prayed;[523]

CLIV.

But thou, of temples old, or altars new, Standest alone--with nothing like to thee-- Worthiest of G.o.d, the Holy and the True!

Since Zion's desolation, when that He Forsook his former city, what could be, Of earthly structures, in His honour piled, Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty-- Power--Glory--Strength--and Beauty all are aisled In this eternal Ark of worship undefiled.

CLV.

Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not; And why? it is not lessened--but thy mind, Expanded by the Genius of the spot, Has grown colossal, and can only find A fit[524] abode wherein appear enshrined Thy hopes of Immortality--and thou Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined See thy G.o.d face to face, as thou dost now His Holy of Holies--nor be blasted by his brow.[pn]

CLVI.

Thou movest--but increasing with the advance,[525]

Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise, Deceived by its gigantic elegance-- Vastness which grows, but grows to harmonize--[po]

All musical in its immensities; Rich marbles, richer painting--shrines where flame[pp]

The lamps of gold--and haughty dome which vies In air with Earth's chief structures, though their frame Sits on the firm-set ground--and this the clouds must claim.

CLVII.

Thou seest not all--but piecemeal thou must break, To separate contemplation, the great whole; And as the Ocean many bays will make That ask the eye--so here condense thy soul To more immediate objects, and control Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart Its eloquent proportions, and unroll[pq]

In mighty graduations, part by part, The Glory which at once upon thee did not dart,

CLVIII.

Not by its fault--but thine: Our outward sense[pr]

Is but of gradual grasp--and as it is That what we have of feeling most intense Outstrips our faint expression; even so this Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great Defies at first our Nature's littleness, Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate Our Spirits to the size of that they contemplate.

CLIX.

Then pause, and be enlightened; there is more In such a survey than the sating gaze Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore The worship of the place, or the mere praise Of Art and its great Masters, who could raise What former time, nor skill, nor thought could plan:[ps]

The fountain of Sublimity displays Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of Man[pt]

Its golden sands, and learn what great Conceptions can.[pu]

CLX.

Or, turning to the Vatican, go see Laoc.o.o.n's[526] 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[pv]

Rivets the living links,--the enormous Asp Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp.[pw]

CLXI.

Or view the Lord of the unerring bow,[527]

The G.o.d of Life, and Poesy, and Light-- The Sun in human limbs arrayed, 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.

CLXII.

But in his delicate form--a dream of Love,[528]

Shaped by some solitary Nymph, whose breast Longed for a deathless lover from above, And maddened in that vision[529]--are exprest All that ideal Beauty ever blessed The mind with in its most unearthly mood, When each Conception was a heavenly Guest-- A ray of Immortality--and stood, Starlike, around, until they gathered to a G.o.d![px]

CLXIII.

And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven The fire which we endure[530]--it was repaid By him to whom the energy was given Which this poetic marble hath arrayed With an eternal Glory--which, if made By human hands, is not of human thought-- And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor laid One ringlet in the dust--nor hath it caught A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought.

CLXIV.