How much to rouse our sympathy and love,
In what is left of those world-famous men,
The conquerors in the field, or they who strove
To conquer with the pen?

What but the stinging verse of satires bought
And sold to flay a friend with fatal ease?
The cirque, where men were slain by beasts for
sport:
What monuments but these?

What, in the name of all their Gods of stone,
But polished plynths of temples raised to lust,
Triumphal arch or portico o'erthrown?
Dust back again to dust!

In every form, self-worship and self-love;
Passions in marble deified with grace;
The cultured arts, like fruitage, carved above
A quickly-crumbled base.

The spirit fled—the informing fire is cold.
And herein lies the difference between
The ruin of the things that we behold,
And of the things unseen.

While the rude stones upraised by peasant hands
Mark where the shattered cross once held control,
The spirit there, Time's cruel scythe withstands,
Soul answers still to soul.

But not so here. I said: when through the gloom
(Cold horror seized and held me there, I wist),
Methought the headless Roman on his tomb,
Moved in the moonlight mist.

The arm was slowly raised wherewith he held
His toga's folds; and in the very place
Where the stone head erst stood I now beheld
A pale stern Roman face.

Then from those lips, as when a night-wind grows
'Mong trembling reeds on Thrasimene's cold lake,
In Latin tongue, a hollow voice arose,
And hoarsely murmuring spake.

"Mortal, now twice ten hundred years are past,
Com'st thou to vex the ashes in my urn,
With all thy vain and shallow wisdom, cast
On the great names that burn

In the world's temple, like fed-lamps of old?
Let none, presumptuous, dare to quench the light,
Because the growing centuries behold
The dawn succeed to night.

The dawn; nor yet the day! The vapours curled
But slowly rise; and ignorances cloud
Which the All-wise hath laid upon his world,
Doth half mankind enshroud.

And He whom blindly we adored as Jove,
O, thou vain Mortal, was it not His will
That knowledge feebly scales the stair above
Higher and higher still?

We found the world barbarian: is it nought,
That where we trod arts sprang beneath our feet?
The tales of virtue and of valour wrought,
Your children still repeat.

Who framed just laws, to govern Kings and crafts?
Who made the streams from hill to hill to flow?
Through Europe's heart who drove the roads, like
shafts
Shot from a mighty bow?

The fierceness, wolf imbibed of all our race,
Made half the world the Roman Eagle's home.
From Greeks, we borrowed poetry aud grace,
Our arms belonged to Rome.

And if the antique virtue ceased to shine,
In days when I had long been out of sight,
Did Rome but share the natural decline
Of all things at their height?

For peace is kin to luxury: they sank
By slow degrees, those latter men, supine,
Rose-garlanded, inglorious, as they drank
The red Falernian wine.

Cool from their grottos by the tideless sea,
Where mantled round with pine and olive wood,
With gardens, baths, and fishponds fair to see,
Their stately villas stood.

Feasting on Lucrine oysters, or the fruit
Of many a distant sea, while boys in praise
Of love their voices mingled with the lute,
In soft emasculate lays.

Not such our lives. We fed, in days of old,
With less refinement, and had rougher games,
Our sterner measures, saturnine and bold,
Had nobler, worthier aims.

We sang the God-like hero in his urn;
We crowned the living Victory with bays,
We worshipped Mars; and Justice, blind and stern,
Sat in our open ways.

To prove the public virtues in this life,
Stands not the Ædile's tomb unto this hour?
And, as a monument to wedded wife,
Behold Metella's tower.

The Vineyard, where the Scissios' ashes lie,
And linked with them, that motherhood, whose
name
While Gracchus is remembered shall not die,
Old Roman worth proclaim.

And there are memories, greater e'en than these,
Embalmed in History, their graves unknown;
While soon or late, Time's ruthless hand doth seize
The perishable stone.

The stone that mocks for some few hundred years,
The honoured relics, gathered 'neath that tomb,
Raised by a loving hand, with pious tears,
Over—ye know not whom!

Such lot is mine. A lucky flight of birds
Presaged my birth: my life was crowned with
fame,                                                                                                                   Men in the forum ever met my words
With reverent acclaim.

They made me Prætor: placed on high my bust;
And when for ever I had passed away,
The city trailed their garments in the dust,
With covered heads that day.

They bare my ashes here: the Senate raised
This sculptured marble, which hath long
survived                                                                                                                     The recollection of the man it praised,
—A memory so short-lived!

Why doth it cumber still the ground?" And here
The hollow voice grew tremulous with scorn.
"To point a moral, obvious and clear,
To ages yet unborn?

That builded tombs, and all the strong desire
To be remembered after death is vain;
The centres of small systems that expire
With us, our souls sustain.

The conscious loss of all that pride believed,
Should keep us living through the future years:
We learn, O Mortal, how we were deceived,
When the hot bitter tears