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(From Italy)
ARENA of the unrewarded brave! | |
| Whose blood flowed unavenged upon thy sand; | |
| Hold of the despot, refuge of the slave, | |
| Den where the assassin made his latest stand: | |
| Altar where hermits their devotion fanned, | 5 |
| Red scaffold where the unshaken martyr died; | |
| Where sped the joust, where danced the motley band; | |
| Stage ever changing! still the pilgrim’s guide | |
| From earth’s remotest shores, who here have smiled or sighed, | |
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| Pouring the thought or passion of the hour, | 10 |
| Great Colosseum! at thy mighty shrine: | |
| Earth’s bosom cumbered with the wrecks of power, | |
| Shows naught beneath the sky to match with thine: | |
| Earthquakes have heaved, storms rent, time worn each line | |
| Of thy majestic fabric, but the eye | 15 |
| O’erteeming, nothing grander can combine | |
| Than thy sublime but shattered symmetry, | |
| Thou wonder, pride, and awe of all that pass thee by. | |
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| Hark! the night’s slumberous air is musical | |
| With the low carolling of birds that seem | 20 |
| To hold here an enduring festival: | |
| How do their notes and nature’s flowers redeem | |
| The place from stained pollution! if the stream | |
| And reek of blood gushed forth from man and beast, | |
| If Cain-like brethren gloated o’er the steam | 25 |
| Of immolation as a welcome feast, | |
| Ages have cleansed the guilt, the unnatural strife hath ceased. * * * * * | |
| The white flowers blossom chapleting a ground | |
| Whose dust was human, they bloom not the less; | |
| Where be the myriads once those seats that crowned? | 30 |
| They gazed on thee, broad Moon! but did not bless | |
| Thine urn, from which they drank no gentleness: | |
| The fight, the hunt, the galley’s crashing prow, | |
| Such were their morning hopes of happiness, | |
| For which they waited with as feverish brow | 35 |
| As for some worthless aim our hearts are beating now. | |
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| Yet rest forgiveness on their memory! | |
| Life’s infancy was theirs, its solemn end | |
| Unknown, they felt not their humanity, | |
| They knew not their vast souls. Lo! how ascend | 40 |
| Tier above tier those benches that extend | |
| In shattered circles, where the Roman sate, | |
| While on his nod, or voice, or finger’s bend, | |
| The gladiator read remorseless fate; | |
| Even so might life or death on one slight motion wait! | 45 |
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| Along its shattered edges on a sky | |
| Of azure, sharply, delicately traced, | |
| The light bird flits o’er flowers that wave from high, | |
| Where human foot shall nevermore be based: | |
| Grass mantles the arena mid defaced | 50 |
| And broken columns freshly, wildly spread; | |
| And through the hollow windows once so graced | |
| With glittering eyes, faint stars their twinklings shed | |
| Lighting as if with life those sockets of the dead! | |
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| So stretches that Titanic skeleton: | 55 |
| Its shattered and enormous circle rent, | |
| And yawning open, arch and covering gone; | |
| As the huge crater’s sides hang imminent | |
| Round the volcano whose last flames are spent, | |
| Whose sounds shall nevermore to heaven aspire, | 60 |
| So frowns that stern and desolate monument; | |
| A stage in ruin, an exhausted pyre, | |
| The actors past to dust, forever quenched the fire! | |
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