Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Italy: Vols. XI–XIII. 1876–79.

Introductory

Italy

By Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874)

FOREVER and forever shalt thou be

Unto the lover and the poet dear,

Thou land of sunlit skies and fountains clear,

Of temples, and gray columns, and waving woods,

And mountains, from whose rifts the bursting floods

Rush in bright tumult to the Adrian sea:

O thou romantic land of Italy!

Mother of painting and sweet sounds! though now

The laurels are all torn from off thy brow,

Yet, though the shape of Freedom now no more

May walk in beauty on thy piny shore,

Shall I, upon whose soul thy poets’ lays,

And all thy songs and hundred stories, fell

Like dim Arabian charms, break the soft spell

That bound me to thee in mine earlier days?

Never, divinest Italy,—thou shalt be

For aye the watchword of the heart to me.

Famous thou art, and shalt be through all time:

Not that because thine iron children hurled

Like arrows o’er the conquest-stricken world

Their tyrannies, but that, in a later day,

Great spirits, and gentle too, triumphing came;

And, as the mighty day-star makes its way

From darkness into light, they toward their fame

Went, gathering splendor till they grew sublime.

Yet first of all thy sons were they who wove

Thy silken language into tales of love,

And fairest far the gentle forms that shine

In thy own poets’ faery songs divine.

O, long as lips shall smile or pitying tears

Rain from the eyes of beauty,—long as fears

Or doubts or hopes shall sear or soothe the heart,

Or flatteries softly fall on woman’s ears,

Or witching words be spoke at twilight hours,

Or tender songs be sung in orange bowers,—

Long as the stars, like ladies’ looks, by night

Shall shine,—more constant and almost as bright,—

So long, though hidden in a foreign shroud,

Shall Dante’s mighty spirit speak aloud:

So long the lamp of fame on Petrarch’s urn

Shall, like the light of learning, duly burn;

And he be loved,—he with his hundred tales,

As varying as the shadowy cloud that sails

Upon the bosom of the April sky,

And musical as when the waters run

Lapsing through sylvan haunts deliciously.

Nor may that gay romancer who hath told

Of knight and damsel and enchantments old,

So well, be e’er forgot; nor he who sung

Of Salem’s holy city lost and won,

The seer-like Tasso, who enamoured hung

On Leonora’s beauty, and became

Her martyr,—blasted by a mingled flame.