| |
| THE SOLITUDES of Helicon | |
| Are rife with gay and scented flowers, | |
| Shining the marble rocks upon, | |
| Or mid the valley’s oaken bowers; | |
| And ever since young Fancy placed | 5 |
| The Hieron of the Muses here, | |
| Have ceaseless generations graced | |
| This airy temple year by year. | |
| |
| But those more bright, more precious, flowers | |
| With which old Greece the Muses wooed, | 10 |
| The Art whose varied forms and powers | |
| Charmed the poetic multitude, | |
| The Thought that from each deep recess | |
| And fissure of the teeming mind | |
| Sent up its odorous fruitfulness,— | 15 |
| What have those glories left behind? | |
| |
| For from those generous calices | |
| The vegetative virtue shed, | |
| Flew over distant lands and seas, | |
| Waking wide nations from the dead; | 20 |
| And e’er the parent plants o’erthrown | |
| Gave place to rank and noisome weed, | |
| The giant Roman world was sown | |
| Throughout with that ennobling seed. | |
| |
| And downward thence to latest days | 25 |
| The heritage of Beauty fell, | |
| And Grecian forms and Grecian lays | |
| Prolonged their humanizing spell, | |
| Till, when new worlds for man to win | |
| The Atlantic’s riven waves disclose, | 30 |
| The wildernesses there begin | |
| To blossom with the Grecian rose. | |
| |
| And all this while in barren shame | |
| Their native land remote reclines, | |
| A mocked and miserable name | 35 |
| Round which some withered ivy twines; | |
| Where, wandering mid the broken tombs, | |
| The remnant of the race forget | |
| That ever with such royal blooms | |
| This Garden of the Soul was set. | 40 |
| |
| O breezes of the wealthy West! | |
| Why bear ye not on grateful wings | |
| The seeds of all your life has blest | |
| Back to their being’s early springs? | |
| Why fill ye not these plains with hopes | 45 |
| To bear the treasures once they bore, | |
| And to these Heliconian slopes | |
| Transport civility and lore? | |
| |
| For now, at least, the soil is free, | |
| Now that one strong reviving breath | 50 |
| Has chased that Eastern tyranny | |
| Which to the Greek was ever death; | |
| Now that, though weak with age and wrongs, | |
| And bent beneath the recent chain, | |
| This motherland of Greece belongs | 55 |
| To her own Western world again. | |
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