| Samuel Waddington, comp. The Sonnets of Europe. 1888. | | | | To Genoa | | By Pastorini |
| | Translated by Leigh Hunt
PROUD city, that by the Ligurian sea | |
| Sittest as at a mirror, lofty and fair; | |
| And towering from thy curving banks in air, | |
| Scornest the mountains that attend on thee; | |
| Why, with such structures, to which Italy | 5 |
| Has nothing else, though glorious, to compare, | |
| Hast thou not souls, with something like a share | |
| Of look, heart, spirit, and ingenuity? | |
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| Better to bury at once (’twould cost thee less) | |
| Thy golden-sweating heaps, where cramp’d from light, | 10 |
| They and their pinch’d fasts ply their old distress. | |
| Thy rotting wealth, unspent, like a thick blight, | |
| Clouds the close eyes of these;—dark hands oppress | |
| With superstition those;—and all is night. | | | | |
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