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Home  »  Specimens of American Poetry  »  James Gates Percival (1795–1856)

Samuel Kettell, ed. Specimens of American Poetry. 1829.

By The Desolate City

James Gates Percival (1795–1856)

I HAD a vision.—

A city before me, desolate,

And yet not all decay’d. A summer sun

Shone on it from a most etherial sky,

And the soft winds threw o’er it such a balm,

One would have thought it was a sepulchre,

And this the incense offer’d to the manes

Of the departed.

In the light it lay

Peacefully, as if all its thousands took

Their afternoon’s repose, and soon would wake

To the loud joy of evening. There it lay,

A city of magnificent palaces,

And churches, towering more like things of heaven,

The glorious fabrics, fancy builds in clouds,

And shapes on loftiest mountains—bright their domes

Threw back the living ray, and proudly stood

Many a statue, looking like the forms

Of spirits hovering in mid air. Tall trees,

Cypress and plane, waved over many a hill

Cumber’d with ancient ruins—broken arches,

And tottering columns—vaults, where never came

The blessed beam of day, but only lamps

Shedding a funeral light, were kindled there,

And gave to the bright frescoes on the walls,

And the pale statues in their far recesses,

A dim religious awe. Rudely they lay,

Scarce marking out to the inquisitive eye

Their earliest outline. But as desolate

Slumber’d the newer city, though its walls

Were yet unbroken, and its towering domes

Had never stoop’d to ruin. All was still;

Hardly the faintest sound of living thing

Moved through the mighty solitude—and yet

All wore the face of beauty. Not a cloud

Hung in the lofty sky, that seem’d to rise

In twofold majesty, so bright and pure,

It seem’d indeed a crystaline sphere—and there

The sun rode onward in his conquering march

Serenely glorious. From the mountain heights

Tinged with the blue of heaven, to the wide sea

Glass’d with as pure a blue, one desolate plain

Spread out, and over it the fairest sky

Bent round and bless’d it. Life was teeming there

In all its lower forms, a wilderness

Of rank luxuriance; flowers, and purpling vines

Matted with deepest foliage, hid the ruins,

And gave the semblance of a tangled wood

To piles, that once were loudly eloquent

With the glad cry of thousands. There were gardens

Round stateliest villas, full of graceful statues,

And temples rear’d to woodland deities;

And they were overcrowded with the excess

Of beauty. All that most is coveted

Beneath a colder sky, grew wantonly

And richly there. Myrtles and citrons fill’d

The air with fragrance. From the tufted elm,

Bent with its own too massy foliage, hung

Clusters of sunny grapes in frosted purple,

Drinking in spirit from the glowing air,

And dropping generous dews. The very wind

Seem’d there a lover, and his easy wings

Fann’d the gay bowers, as if in fond delay

He bent o’er loveliest things, too beautiful

Ever to know decay. The silent air

Floating as softly as a cloud of roses,

Dropp’d from Idalia in a dewy shower,—

The air itself seem’d like the breath of heaven

Filling the groves of Eden. Yet these walls

Are desolate—not a trace of living man

Is found amid these glorious works of man,

And nature’s fairer glories. Why should he

Be absent from the festival of life,

The holiday of nature? Why not come

To add to the sweet sounds of winds and waters—

Of winds uttering Æolian melodies

To the bright, listening flowers, and waters falling

Most musical from marble fountains wreathed

With clustering ivy, like a poet’s brow—

Why comes he not to add his higher strains,

And be the interpreter of lower things,

In intellectual worship, at the throne

Of the Beneficent Power, that gave to them

Their pride and beauty?—“In these palaces,

These awful temples, these religious caves,

These hoary ruins, and these twilight groves

Teeming with life and love,—a secret plague

Dwells, and the unwary foot, that ventures here,

Returns not.—Fly! To linger here is death.”