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I. THERE needs not choral song, nor organ’s pealing:— | |
| This mighty cloister of itself inspires | |
| Thoughts breathed like hymns from spiritual choirs; | |
| While shades and lights, in soft succession stealing, | |
| Along it creep, now veiling, now revealing | 5 |
| Strange forms, here traced by painting’s earliest sires,— | |
| Angels with palms; and purgatorial fires; | |
| And saints caught up, and demons round them reeling. | |
| Love, long remembering those she could not save, | |
| Here hung the cradle of Italian Art: | 10 |
| Faith rocked it: like a hermit child went forth | |
| From hence that power which beautified the earth. | |
| She perished when the world had lured her heart | |
| From her true friends, Religion and the Grave. | |
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II. LAMENT not thou: the cold winds, as they pass | 15 |
| Through the ribbed fretwork with low sigh or moan, | |
| Lament enough: let them lament alone, | |
| Counting the sear leaves of the innumerous grass | |
| With thin, soft sound like one prolonged,—alas! | |
| Spread thou thy hands on sun-touched vase, or stone | 20 |
| That yet retains the warmth of sunshine gone, | |
| And drink warm solace from the ponderous mass. | |
| Gaze not around thee. Monumental marbles, | |
| Time-clouded frescos, mouldering year by year, | |
| Dim cells in which all day the night-bird warbles,— | 25 |
| These things are sorrowful elsewhere, not here: | |
| A mightier Power than Art’s hath here her shrine: | |
| Stranger! thou tread’st the soil of Palestine! | |
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