THE TEPID air bespeaks repose, | |
| The noonday city sleeps; | |
| No shadow from the cypress groves | |
| Athwart the Tiber creeps. | |
| This seems the very land of rest | 5 |
| To wondering wanderers from the West, | |
| Who walk as if in dreams; | |
| English Ambition’s onward cry, | |
| To all beneath this opiate sky | |
| Yet untranslated seems. | 10 |
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| Here is the goal; here ended all | |
| His tragedy of life! | |
| The honors, banishment, recall, | |
| The love, the hate, the strife! | |
| A weary man, the poet came | 15 |
| To light a funeral-torch’s flame | |
| At yonder chancel light; | |
| When here he summed up all his days, | |
| Heedless of human blame or praise, | |
| And turned him to the Night! | 20 |
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| O holy Jerome! at thy shrine, | |
| Who could hope better meed, | |
| Than he who sang the song divine | |
| Of crusade and of creed! | |
| Who loved upon Jerusalem, | 25 |
| As thou didst when at Bethlehem, | |
| The Master’s steps to trace! | |
| Who burned to tread the very sod | |
| Imprinted by the feet of God, | |
| In the first years of grace! | 30 |
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| Wrapt in the shade of Tasso’s Oak, | |
| I breathe the air of Rome: | |
| He found his final home | |
| Where, freed from every patron’s yoke, | |
| The Alban and the Sabine range | 35 |
| Down yonder, seeming nothing strange, | |
| Although first seen by me; | |
| Firm as those storied highlands stand, | |
| So, deep-laid in Italian land, | |
| Shall Tasso’s glory be. | 40 |
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| Calm here, within his altar-grave, | |
| The restless takes his rest; | |
| Besculptured, as becomes the brave, | |
| With nodding casque, and crest, | |
| And shield, on which we trace the line, | 45 |
| The key-note of his song divine, | |
| “Pro Fide!” Tasso lies. | |
| So may we find our legend writ, | |
| What time the Crucified shall sit | |
| For judgment, in the skies! | 50 |
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