LV.
These are four minds, which, like the elements,
Might furnish forth creation:—Italy![1]
Time, which hath wronged thee with ten thousand rents
Of thine imperial garment, shall deny[2]
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[3] is to-day.
- ↑ Might furnish forth a Universe——.—[MS. M.]
- ↑
And ruin of thy beauty, shall deny
And hath denied, to every other sky
Spirits that soar like thine; from thy decayStill springs some son of the Divinity
Still springs some work of the Divinity,—[D.].And gilds thy ruins with reviving ray—
And what these were of yore—Canova is to-day.—[MS. M.] - ↑ [Compare "Lines on the Bust of Helen by Canova," which were sent in a letter to Murray, November 25, 1816—
lovers of pleasure as well as lovers and students of literature; but their works do not provoke comparison. "The quality of 'a narrow elevation' which [Matthew] Arnold finds in Alfieri," is not characteristic of the author of Childe Harold and Don Juan.
Of this stanza, however, Alfieri's fine sonnet to Florence may have been the inspiration. I have Dr. Garnett's permission to cite the following lines of his admirable translation (Italian Literature, 1898, p. 321):—
"Was Angelo born here? and he who wove
Love's charm with sorcery of Tuscan tongue,
Indissolubly blent? and he whose song
Laid bare the world below to world above?
And he who from the lonely valley clove
The azure height and trod the stars among?
And he whose searching mind the monarch's wrong,
Fount of the people's misery did prove?"]
