DELPHI

BENEATH the vintage moon's uncertain light,

And some faint stars that pierced the film of cloud,

Stood those Parnassian peaks before my sight,

Whose fame throughout the ancient world was loud.

Still could I dimly trace the terraced lines

Diverging from the cliffs on either side;
A theatre whose steps were filled with shrines
And rich devices of Hellenic pride.

Now brightest daylight would have lit in vain

The place whence gods and worshippers had fled; Only, and they too tenantless, remain

The hallowed chambers of the pious dead.

Yet those wise architects an ample part

To Nature gave in their religious shows,

And thus, amid the sepultures of Art,

Still rise the Rocks and still the Fountain flows.

Desolate Delphi! pure Castalian spring!
Hear me avow that I am not as they-

Who deem that all about you ministe'ring

Were base impostors, and mankind their prey :

That the high names they seemed to love and laud
Were but the tools their paltry trade to ply;
This pomp of Faith a mere gigantic fraud,
The apparatus of a mighty lie!

Let those that will believe it; I, for one,
Cannot thus read the history of my kind;
Remembe'ring all this little Greece has done
To raise the universal human mind :

I doubt not, hierarchs of that plastic race,
By faith received and given, could keep alive
Those awful rites and sanctities of place,—

Believing where they seemed but to contrive :

And thus these mighty sympathies, combined With such rare nature as the priestess bore, Brought to the surface of her stormy mind Distracted fragments of prophetic lore.

For, howsoe'er to mortals' probing view
Creation is revealed, yet must we pause,
Weak to dissect the futile from the true,
Where vast Imagination spreads her laws.

So now that dimmer grows the watery light, And things each moment more fantastic seem, I fain would seek if still the Gods have might Over the undissembling world of dream:

I ask not that for me aside be cast

The solemn veil that hides what is decreed; I crave the resurrection of the past,

That I may know what Delphi was indeed!

Ост., 1842.

THE TOMB OF LAIUS.

WHERE Delphi's consecrated pass
Boeotia's misty region faces,*

Rises a tomb-like stony mass

Amid the bosky mountain-bases; It seems no work of human care,

But many rocks split off from one: Laius, the Theban king, lies there,-His murderer Edipus, his son.

No pilgrim to the Pythian shrine

But marked the spot with decent awe,

In presence of a power divine,

O'erruling human will and law:

And to some thoughtful hearts that scene

Those paths, that mound, those browsing herds,

Were more than e'er that tale had been,

Arrayed in Sophoclean words.

So is it yet,

-no time or space

That ancient anguish can assuage,

For sorrow is of every race,

And suffe'ring due from every age;

That awful legend falls to us,

With all the weight that Greece could feel,

And every man is Edipus,

Whose wounds no mortal skill can heal.

* At the "Schiste Hodos," or "Triodos.

1842.

Oh! call it Providence or Fate,

The Sphynx propounds the riddle still, That Man must bear and expiate

Loads of involuntary ill :

So shall Endurance ever hold

The foremost rank 'mid human needs, Not without faith, that God can mould To good the dross of evil deeds.

THE FLOWERS OF HELICON.

THE solitudes of Helicon

Are rife with gay and scented flowers,
Shining the marble rocks upon,

Or 'mid the valley's oaken bowers;
And ever since young Fancy placed
The Hieron of the Muses here,
Have ceaseless generations graced
This airy Temple year by year.

But those more bright, more precious, flowers
With which old Greece the Muses woo'd,
The Art, whose varied forms and powers
Charmed the poetic multitude,

The Thought, that from each deep recess
And fissure of the teeming mind

Sent up its odo'rous fruitfulness——

What have those glories left behind?

For from those generous calices

The vegetative virtue shed, Flew over distant lands and seas,

Waking wide nations from the dead; And e'er the parent plants o'erthrown

Gave place to rank and noisome weed, The giant Roman world was sown Throughout with that ennobling seed.

And downward thence to latest days
The heritage of Beauty fell,
And Grecian forms and Grecian lays

Prolonged their humanising spell,
Till, when new worlds for man to win
The' Atlantic's riven waves disclose,
The wildernesses there begin

To blossom with the Grecian rose.

And all this while in barren shame
Their native land remote reclines,
A mocked and miserable name

Round which some withered ivy twines:
Where, wandering 'mid the broken tombs,
The remnant of the race forget
That ever with such royal blooms
This Garden of the Soul was set.

O breezes of the wealthy West!
Why bear ye not on grateful wings
The seeds of all your life has blest

Back to their being's early springs?
Why fill ye not these plains with hopes
To bear the treasures once they bore,
And to these Heliconian slopes
Transport civility and lore?