Whate'er it strikes;--yon head is doubly sacred now.

XLII.

Italia! oh, Italia! thou who hast[421]
The fatal gift of Beauty, which became
A funeral dower of present woes and past--
On thy sweet brow is sorrow ploughed by shame,[mn]
And annals graved in characters of flame.
Oh, God! that thou wert in thy nakedness
Less lovely or more powerful, and couldst claim
Thy right, and awe the robbers back, who press
To shed thy blood, and drink the tears of thy distress;

XLIII.

Then might'st thou more appal--or, less desired,
Be homely and be peaceful, undeplored[mo]
For thy destructive charms; then, still untired,
Would not be seen the armed torrents poured
Down the deep Alps; nor would the hostile horde
Of many-nationed spoilers from the Po
Quaff blood and water; nor the stranger's sword
Be thy sad weapon of defence--and so,
Victor or vanquished, thou the slave of friend or foe.

XLIV.

Wandering in youth, I traced the path of him,
The Roman friend of Rome's least-mortal mind,[422]
The friend of Tully: as my bark did skim
The bright blue waters with a fanning wind,
Came Megara before me, and behind
AEgina lay--Piraeus on the right,
And Corinth on the left; I lay reclined
Along the prow, and saw all these unite
In ruin--even as he had seen the desolate sight;

XLV.

For Time hath not rebuilt them, but upreared
Barbaric dwellings on their shattered site,
Which only make more mourned and more endeared
The few last rays of their far-scattered light,
And the crashed relics of their vanished might.
The Roman saw these tombs in his own age,
These sepulchres of cities, which excite[mp]
Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page
The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage.

XLVI.

That page is now before me, and on mine
_His_ Country's ruin added to the mass
Of perished states he mourned in their decline,
And I in desolation: all that _was_
Of then destruction _is_; and now, alas!
Rome--Rome imperial, bows her to the storm,[423]
In the same dust and blackness, and we pass
The skeleton of her Titanic form,[424]
Wrecks o