Richard Monckton Milnes (Ричард Монктон Милнс)

An Italian to Italy

Along the coast of those bright seas,
Where sternly fought of old
The Pisan and the Genoese,
Into the evening gold
A ship was sailing fast,
Beside whose swaying mast
There leant a youth;--his eye's extended scope
Took in the scene, ere all the twilight fell;
And, more in blessing than in hope,
He murmured,--``Fare--thee--well.

``Not that thou gav'st my fathers birth,
And not that thou hast been
The terror of the ancient earth
And Christendom's sole Queen;
But that thou wert and art
The beauty of my heart:--
Now with a lover's love I pray to thee,
As in my passionate youth--time erst I prayed;
Now, with a lover's agony,
I see thy features fade.

``They tell me thou art deeply low;
They brand thee weak and vile;
The cruel Northman tells me so,
And pities me the while:
What can he know of thee,
Glorified Italy?
Never has Nature to his infant mouth
Bared the full summer of her living breast;
Never the warm and mellow South
To his young lips was prest.

``I know,--and thought has often striven
The justice to approve,--
I know that all that God has given
Is given us to love;
But still I have a faith,
Which must endure till death,
That Beauty is the mother of all Love;
And Patriot Love can never purely glow
Where frowns the veilèd heaven above,
And the ****rd earth below.

``The wealth of high ancestral name,
And silken household ties,
And battle--fields' memorial fame,
He earnestly may prize
Who loves and honours not
The country of his lot,
With undiscerning piety,--the same
Filial religion, be she great and brave,
Or sunk in sloth and red with shame,
A monarch or a slave.

``But He who calls this heaven his own,
The very lowliest one,
Is conscious of a holier zone,
And nearer to the sun:
Ever it bids him hail,
Cloud--feathered and clear pale,
Or one vast dome of deep immaculate blue,
Or, when the moon is on her mid--year throne,
With richer but less brilliant hue,
Built up of turkis stone.

``The springing corn that steeped in light
Looks emerald, between
The delicate olive--branches, dight
In reverend gray--green;
Each flower with open breast,
To the gale it loves the best;
The bland outbreathings of the midland sea,
The aloe--fringed and myrtle--shadowed shore,
Are precious things,--Oh, wo the be
Must they be mine no more?

``And shall the matin bell awake
My native village crowd,
To kneel at shrines, whose pomp would make
A Northern city proud?
And shall the festival
Of closing Carnival
Bid the gay laughers thro' those arches pour,
Whose marble mass confronts its parent hill,
--And I upon a far bleak shore!
My heart will see them still.

``For though in poverty and fear,
Thou think'st upon the morrow,
Dutiful Art is ever near,
To wile thee from all sorrow;
Thou hast a power of melody,
To lull all sense of slavery;
Thy floral crown is blowing still to blow,
Thy eye of glory ceases not to shine,
And so long as these things be so,
I feel thee, bless thee, mine!''

1. Cannae
2. Corfu
3. Switzerland and Italy
4. A Dream in a Gondola
5. The Subterranean River, At Cong

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