Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock
Page 129
The raptures of prophetic joy.
A sudden breeze his temples fanned:
His harp, untouched by human hand,
Sent forth a sound, a thrilling sound,
That rang through all the mystic round
The incense-flame rose broad and bright,
In one wide stream of meteor-light.
He knew what power illumed the blaze,
What spirit swept the strings along:
Full on the youth his kindling gaze
He fixed, and poured his soul in song.
Roman! life’s declining tide
From my bosom ebbs apace:
Vengeance have the gods denied
For the ruin of my race.
Triumph not: in night compressed,
Yet the northern tempests rest,
Doomed to burst, in fatal hour,
On the pride of Roman power.
Sweetly beams the morning ray:
Proudly falls the noon-tide glow:
See! beneath the closing day,
Storm-clouds darken, whirlwinds blow!
Sun-beams gild the tranquil shore:
Hark! the midnight breakers roar!
O’er the deep, by tempests torn,
Shrieks of shipwrecked souls are borne!
Queen of earth, imperial Rome
Rules, in boundless way confessed,
From the day-star’s orient dome
To the limits of the west.
Proudest work of mortal hands,
The Eternal City stands:
Bound in her all-circling sphere,
Monarchs kneel, and nations fear.
Hark! the stream of ages raves:
Gifted eyes its course behold:
Down its all-absorbing waves
Mightiest chiefs and kings are rolled.
Every work of human pride,
Sapped by that eternal tide,
Shall the raging current sweep
Tow’rds oblivion’s boundless deep.
Confident in wide control,
Rome beholds that torrent flow,
Heedless how the waters roll,
Wasting, mining, as they go.
That sure torrent saps at length
Walls of adamantine strength:
Down its eddies wild shall pass
Domes of marble, towers of brass.
As the sailor’s fragile bark,
Beaten by the adverse breeze,
Sinks afar, and leaves no mark
Of its passage o’er the seas;
So shall Rome’s colossal sway
In the lapse of time decay,
Leaving of her ancient fame
But the memorv of a name.
Vainly raged the storms of Gaul
Round dread Jove’s Tarpeian dome:
See in flames the fabric fall!
’Tis the funeral pyre of Rome!
Red-armed vengeance rushes forth
In the whirlwinds of the north:
From her hand the sceptre riven
To transalpine realms is given.
Darkness veils the stream of time,
As the wrecks of Rome dissolve:
Years of anarchy and crime
In barbaric night revolve.
From the rage of feudal strife
Peace and freedom spring to life,
Where the morning sun-beams smile
On the sea-god’s favorite isle.
Hail! all hail! my native land!
Long thy course of glory keep:
Long thy sovereign sails expand
O’er the subjugated deep!
When of Rome’s unbounded reign
Dust and shade alone remain,
Thou thy head divine shalt raise,
Through interminable days.
Death-mists hover: voices rise:
I obey the summons dread:
On the stone my life-blood dyes
Sinks to rest my weary head.
Far from scenes of night and woe,
To eternal groves I go,
Where for me my brethren wait
By Andraste’s palace-gate.
THE GENIUS OF THE THAMES. PART II.
Quidquid sol oriens, quidquid et occidens
Novit; cæruleis oceanus fretis
Quidquid vel veniens vel fugiens lavat,
Ætas Pegaseo conripiet gradu.
SENECA
OH Genius of that sacred urn,
Adored by all the Naiad train!
Once more my wandering steps return
To trace the precincts of thy reign:
Once more, amid my native plain,
I roam thy devious course along,
And in the oaken shade again
Awake to thee the votive song.
Dear stream! while far from thee I strayed,
The woods, that crown my natal glade,
Have mourned on all the winds of heaven
Their yellow faded foliage driven;
And winter, with tempestuous roar,
Descending on thy wasted shore,
Has seen thy turbid current flow
A deluge of dissolving snow.
But now, in spring’s more soft control,
Thy troubled waves subside,
And through a narrower channel roll
A brighter, gentler tide.
Emerging now in light serene,
The meadows spread their robes of green,
The weeping willow droops to lave
Its leafy tresses in the wave;
The poplar and the towering pine
Their hospitable shade combine;
And, flying like the flying day,
The silent river rolls away.
Not here, in dreadful grandeur piled,
The mountain’s pathless masses rise,
Where wandering fancy’s lonely child
Might meet the spirit of the skies:
Not here, from misty summits hoar,
Where shattered firs are rooted strong,
With headlong force and thundering roar
The bursting torrent foams along:
Sublime the charms such scenes contain:
For nature on her mountain reign
Delights the treasures to dispense
Of all her wild magnificence:
But thou art sweet, my native stream!
Thy waves in liquid lustre play,
And glitter in the morning beam,
And chime to rest the closing day:
While the vast mountain’s dizzy steep
The whirlwind’s eddying rage assails,
The gentlest zephyrs softly sweep
The verdure of thy sheltered vales:
While o’er the wild and whitening seas
The unbridled north triumphant roars,
Thy stream scarce ripples in the breeze,
That bends the willow on thy shores:
And thus, while war o’er Europe flings
Destruction from his crimson wings,
While Danube’s wasted banks around
The steps of mingling foes resound,
Thy pure waves wash a stainless soil,
To crown a patriot people’s toil.
Yet on these shores, in elder days,
Arose the battle’s maddening blaze:
Even here, where now so softly swells
The music of the village-bells,
The painted savage rolled to war
The terrors of the scythed car,
And wide around, with fire and sword,
The devastating Roman poured:
Here shouted o’er the battle-plain
The Pict, the Saxon, and the Dane:
And many a long succeeding year
Saw the fierce Norman’s proud career,
The deadly hate of feudal foes,
The stain that dyed the pallid rose,
And all the sanguinary spoil
Of foreign and intestine broil.
But now, through banks from strife remote,
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br /> Thy crystal waters wind along,
Responsive to the wild bird’s note,
Or lonely boatman’s careless song.
Oh ne’er may thy sweet echoes swell
Again with war’s demoniac yell!
Oh! ne’er again may civil strife
Here aim the steel at kindred life!
Ne’er may those deeds of night and crime,
That stain the rolls of feudal time,
Again pollute these meads and groves,
Where science dwells, and beauty roves!
And should some foreign tyrant’s band
Descend to waste the beauteous land,
Thy swelling current, eddying red,
Shall roll away the impious dead.
Let fancy lead, from Trewsbury Mead,
With hazel fringed, and copsewood deep,
Where scarcely seen, through brilliant green,
Thy infant waters softly creep,
To where the wide-expanding Nore
Beholds thee, with tumultuous roar,
Conclude thy devious race,
And rush, with Medway’s confluent wave,
To seek, where mightier billows rave,
Thy giant-sire’s embrace.
Where Kemble’s wood-embosomed spire
Adorns the solitary glade,
And ancient trees, in green attire,
Diffuse a deep and pleasant shade,
Thy bounteous urn, light-murmuring, flings
The treasures of its infant springs,
And fast, beneath its native hill,
Impels the silver-sparkling rill,
With flag-flowers fringed and whispering reeds,
Along the many-colored meads.
Thames! when, beside thy secret source
Remembrance points the mighty course
Thy defluent waters keep;
Advancing, with perpetual flow,
Through banks still widening as they go,
To mingle with the deep;
Emblemed in thee, my thoughts survey
Unruffled childhood’s peaceful hours,
And blooming youth’s delightful way
Through sunny fields and roseate bowers;
And thus the scenes of life expand
Till death draws forth, with steady hand,
Our names from his capacious urn;
And dooms alike the base and good,
To pass that all-absorbing flood,
O’er which is no return.
Whence is the ample stream of time?
Can fancy’s mightiest spell display,
Where first began its flow sublime,
Or where its onward waves shall stray?
What gifted hand shall pierce the clouds
Oblivion’s fatal magic rears,
And lift the sable veil, that shrouds
The current of the distant years ?
The sage with doubt the past surveys,
Through mists which memory half dispels:
And on the course of future days
Impenetrable darkness dwells.
The present rolls in light: awhile
We hail its evanescent smile,
Rejoicing as it flies:
Ephemera on the summer-stream,
Heedless of the descending beam,
And distant lowering skies.
False joys, with fading flowerets crowned,
And hope, too late delusive found,
And fancy’s meteor-ray,
And all the passions, light and vain,
That fill ambition’s fatal train,
Attend our downward way.
Some struggle on, by tempests driven:
To some a gentler course is given:
All down the self-same stream are rolled:
Their day is passed — their tale is told.
Youth flies, as bloom forsakes the grove,
When icy winter blows:
And transient are the smiles of love,
As dew-drops on the rose.
Nor may we call those things our own,
Which, ere the new-born day be flown,
By chance, or fraud, or lawless might,
Or sterner death’s supreme award,
Will change their momentary lord,
And own another’s right.
As oceans now o’er quicksands roar,
Where fields and hamlets smiled of yore;
As now the purple heather blows,
Where once impervious forests rose;
So perish from the burthened ground
The monuments of human toil:
Where cities shone, where castles frowned,
The careless ploughman turns the soil.
How many a chief, whose kindling mind
Convulsed this earthly scene,
Has sunk, forgotten by mankind,
As though he ne’er had been!
Even so the chiefs of modern days,
On whom admiring nations gaze,
Shall sink, by common fate oppressed:
Their name, their place remembered not
Not one grey stone to point the spot
Of their eternal rest.
Flow proudly, Thames! the emblem bright
And witness of succeeding years!
Flow on, in freedom’s sacred light,
Nor stained with blood, nor swelled with tears.
Sweet is thy course, and clear, and still,
By Ewan’s old neglected mill:
Green shores thy narrow stream confine,
Where blooms the modest eglantine,
And hawthorn-boughs o’ershadowing spread,
To canopy thy infant bed.
Now peaceful hamlets wandering through,
And fields in beauty ever new,
Where Lechlade sees thy current strong
First waft the unlaboring bark along;
Thy copious waters hold their way
Tow’rds Radcote’s arches, old and grey,
Where triumphed erst the rebel host,
When hapless Richard’s hopes were lost,
And Oxford sought, with humbled pride,
Existence from thy guardian tide.
The wild-flower waves, in lonely bloom,
On Godstow’s desolated wall:
There thin shades flit through twilight gloom,
And murmured accents feebly fall.
The aged hazel nurtures there
Its hollow fruit, so seeming fair,
And lightly throws its humble shade,
Where Rosamonda’s form is laid.
The rose of earth, the sweetest flower
That ever graced a monarch’s breast,
In vernal beauty’s loveliest hour,
Beneath that sod was laid to rest.
In vain, the bower of love around,
The Dædalëan path was wound:
Alas! that jealous hate should find
The clue for love alone designed!
The venomed bowl, — the mandate dire, —
The menaced steel’s uplifted glare, —
The tear, that quenched the blue eye’s fire, —
The humble, ineffectual prayer: —
All these shall live, recorded long
In tragic and romantic song,
And long a moral charm impart,
To melt and purify the heart.
A nation’s gem, a monarch’s pride,
In youth, in loveliness, she died:
The morning sun’s ascending ray
Saw none so fair, so blest, so gay:
Ere evening came, her funeral knell
Was tolled by Godstow’s convent bell.
The marble tomb, the illumined shrine.
Their unavailing splendor gave:
Where slept in earth the maid divine,
The votive silk was seen to wave.
To her, as to a martyred saint,
His vows the weeping pilgrim poured
The drooping traveller, sad and faint,
Knelt there, and found his strength restored
To that fair shrine, in solemn hour,
Fond youths and blushing maidens came,
And gathered from its mystic power
A brighter, purer, holier flame:
The lightest heart with awe could feel
The charm her hovering spirit shed:
But superstition’s impious zeal
Distilled its venom on the dead!
The illumined shrine has passed away:
The sculptured stone in dust is laid:
But when the midnight breezes play
Amid the barren hazel’s shade,
The lone enthusiast, lingering near,
The youth whom slighted passion grieves,
Through fancy’s magic spell may hear
A spirit in the whispering leaves;
And dimly see, while mortals sleep,
Sad forms of cloistered maidens move,
The transient dreams of life to weep,
The fading flowers of youth and love!
Now, rising o’er the level plain,
Mid academic groves enshrined,
The Gothic tower, the Grecian fane,
Ascend, in solemn state combined.
Science, beneath those classic spires,
Illumes her watch-lamp’s orient fires,
And pours its everlasting rays
On archives of primeval days.
To her capacious view unfurled,
The mental and material world
Their secrets deep display:
She measures nature’s ample plan,
To hold the light of truth to man,
And guide his erring way.
Oh sun-crowned science! child of heaven!
To wandering man by angels given!
Still, nymph divine! on mortal sight
Diffuse thy intellectual light,
Till all the nations own thy sway,
And drink with joy the streams of day!
Yet lovest thou, maid! alone to rove
In cloister dim, or polished grove,
Where academic domes are seen
Emerging grey through foliage green ?
Oh! hast thou not thy hermit seat,
Embosomed deep in mountains vast,
Where some fair valley’s still retreat
Repels the north’s impetuous blast ?
The falling stream there murmurs by:
The tufted pine waves broad and high:
And musing silence sits beneath,
Where scarce a zephyr bends the heath,
And hears the breezes, loud and strong,
Resound the topmost boughs among.
There peace her vestal lamp displays,
Undimmed by mad ambition’s blaze,
And shuns, in the sequestered glen,
The storms that shake the haunts of men,
Where mean intrigue, and sordid gain,
And phrensied war’s ensanguined reign,
And narrow cares and wrathful strife,
Dry up the sweetest springs of life.
Oh! might my steps, that darkly roam,