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(From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)
IN Santa Croce’s holy precincts lie | |
| Ashes which make it holier, dust which is | |
| Even in itself an immortality, | |
| Though there were nothing save the past, and this | |
| The particle of those sublimities | 5 |
| Which have relapsed to chaos;—here repose | |
| Angelo’s, Alfieri’s bones, and his, | |
| The starry Galileo, with his woes; | |
| Here Machiavelli’s earth returned to whence it rose. | |
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| These are four minds, which, like the elements, | 10 |
| Might furnish forth creation;—Italy! | |
| Time, which hath wronged thee with ten thousand rents | |
| Of thine imperial garment, shall deny, | |
| And hath denied, to every other sky, | |
| Spirits which soar from ruin: thy decay | 15 |
| Is still impregnate with divinity, | |
| Which gilds it with revivifying ray; | |
| Such as the great of yore, Canova is to-day. | |
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| But where repose the all Etruscan three,— | |
| Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they, | 20 |
| The Bard of Prose, creative spirit! he | |
| Of the Hundred Tales of love,—where did they lay | |
| Their bones, distinguished from our common clay | |
| In death as life? Are they resolved to dust, | |
| And have their country’s marbles naught to say? | 25 |
| Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust? | |
| Did they not to her breast their filial earth intrust? | |
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| Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, | |
| Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore; | |
| Thy factions, in their worse than civil war, | 30 |
| Proscribed the bard whose name forevermore | |
| Their children’s children would in vain adore | |
| With the remorse of ages; and the crown | |
| Which Petrarch’s laureate brow supremely wore, | |
| Upon a far and foreign soil had grown, | 35 |
| His life, his fame, his grave, though rifled,—not thine own. | |
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| Boccaccio to his parent earth bequeathed | |
| His dust,—and lies it not her Great among, | |
| With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed | |
| O’er him who formed the Tuscan’s siren tongue,— | 40 |
| That music in itself, whose sounds are song, | |
| The poetry of speech? No; even his tomb | |
| Uptorn, must bear the hyena bigots wrong, | |
| No more amidst the meaner dead find room, | |
| Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for whom. | 45 |
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| And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust; | |
| Yet for this want more noted, as of yore | |
| The Cæsar’s pageant, shorn of Brutus’ bust, | |
| Did but of Rome’s best son remind her more. | |
| Happier Ravenna! on thy hoary shore, | 50 |
| Fortress of falling empire, honored sleeps | |
| The immortal exile;—Arqua, too, her store | |
| Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps, | |
| While Florence vainly begs her banished dead, and weeps. | |
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