Sempre vivete, o cari arti divine,
Conforto a nostra sventurata gente,
Fra l' itale ruine

GI' itali pregi a celebrare intente.

G. LEOPARDI.

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 niggard 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 :

"Beautiful forms! and aye repent

The waywardness and pride,

That was not with their charms content,

And yearned for aught beside e;

For some imagined bliss

I might have slain all this,

I might have sprent thy gorgeous robe with blood, And scarred the lucid clearness of thy brow,

Dear land! in sooth, I meant thee good,

But know the madness now.

"What though in poverty and fear,

Thou thinkst upon the morrow,

Dutiful Art is ever near,

To wile thee from all sorrow;