Showered on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from an urn!

LII.

Glowing, and circumfused in speechless love--[mt][430]
Their full divinity inadequate
That feeling to express, or to improve--
The Gods become as mortals--and man's fate[mu]
Has moments like their brightest; but the weight
Of earth recoils upon us;--let it go!
We can recall such visions, and create,
From what has been, or might be, things which grow
Into thy statue's form, and look like gods below.

LIII.

I leave to learned fingers, and wise hands,
The Artist and his Ape, to teach and tell
How well his Connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend, and the voluptuous swell:
Let these describe the undescribable:
I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream
Wherein that Image shall for ever dwell--
The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream
That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam.

LIV.

In Santa Croce's[431] holy precincts lie[15.H.]
Ashes which make it holier, dust which is
Even in itself an immortality,
Though there were nothing save the past, and this,
The particle of those sublimities
Which have relapsed to chaos:--here repose
Angelo's--Alfieri's[432] bones--and his,[16.H.]
The starry Galileo, with his woes;
Here Machiavelli's earth returned to whence it rose.[17.H.]

LV.

These are four minds, which, like the elements,
Might furnish forth creation:--Italy![mv]
Time, which hath wronged thee with ten thousand rents
Of thine imperial garment, shall deny[mw]
And hath denied, to every other sky,
Spirits which soar from ruin:--thy Decay
Is still impregnate with divinity,
Which gilds it with revivifying ray;
Such as the great of yore, Canova[433] is to-day.

LVI.

But where repose the all Etruscan three--
Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they,
The Bard of Prose, creative Spirit! he[mx]
Of the Hundred Tales of Love--where did they lay
Their bones, distinguished from our common clay
In death as life? Are they resolved to dust,
And have their Country's Marbles nought to say?
Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust?