Divina Commedia.

49

How

II.

OW strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!

This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves Birds build their nests; while canopied with

leaves

Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers, And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!

But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled

eaves

Watch the dead Christ between the living

thieves,

And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!

D

50

Divina Commedia.

Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,

What tenderness, what tears, what hate of

wrong,

What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This mediæval miracle of song!

Divina Commedia.

51

I

III.

ENTER, and I see thee in the gloom
Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!

And strive to make my steps keep pace

with thine.

The air is filled with some unknown per

fume;

The congregation of the dead make room

For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine; Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine

The hovering echoes fly from tomb to

tomb.

52

Divina Commedia.

From the confessionals I hear arise

Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies,

And lamentations from the crypts below; And then a voice celestial, that begins

With the pathetic words, "Although your sins

As scarlet be," and ends with "as the

snow."

Divina Commedia.

53

I

IV.

LIFT mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
With forms of saints and holy men who

died,

Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves dis-
plays

Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays With splendour upon splendour multiplied;

And Beatrice again at Dante's side

No more rebukes, but smiles her words of

praise.