GRENVILLE MELLEN. THE TRUE GLORY OF AMERICA. ITALIA'S vales and fountains, From out your cloudy years, Seem dim through Nature's tears, The jewell'd crown and sceptre The world has shaken with the tread The victor's footsteps point to doom, Rome! with thy pillar'd palaces, And sculptured heroes all, Snatch'd, in their warm, triumphal days, Rome! with thy giant sons of power, On yet unburied bones, I would not have my land like thee, So lofty yet so cold! Be hers a lowlier majesty, Thy marbles - works of wonder! In thy victorious days, Whose lips did seem to sunder Before the astonish'd gaze; When statute glared on statute there, The living on the dead, And men as silent pilgrims were Before some sainted head! O, not for faultless marbles yet Would I the light forego That beams when other lights have set, And Art herself lies low. O, ours a holier hope shall be To snatch us from the dust. Then let them bind with bloomless flowers The busts and urns of old, – A fairer heritage be ours, A sacrifice less cold! Give honor to the great and good, So, when the good and great go down, To crowd those temples of our own, And when the sculptured marble falls, And Art goes in to die, Our forms shall live in holier halls, The Pantheon of the sky! THE BUGLE. O! WILD, enchanting horn! Whose music up the deep and dewy air Swells to the clouds, and calls on Echo there, Till a new melody is born - Wake, wake again, the night Is bending from her throne of beauty down, With still stars burning on her azure crown, Intense and eloquently bright. Night, at its pulseless noon! When the far voice of waters mourns in song, And some tired watch-dog, lazily and long Barks at the melancholy moon. Hark! how it sweeps away, (i) Soaring and dying on the silent sky, Swell, swell in glory out! Thy tones come pouring on my leaping heart, And my stirr'd spirit hears thee with a start As boyhood's old remember'd shout. heard that peal, From sleeping city's moon-bathed battlements, Or from the guarded field and warrior tents, Like some near breath around you steal? Or have ye in the roar Of sea, or storm, or battle, heard it rise, No music that of air or earth is born, Can match the mighty music of that horn, On midnight's fathomless profound! |