Suffers religious faith. Elate with view Of what is won, we overlook or scorn The best that should keep pace with it, and must, Can spare, and humblest earthly Weal demands, Given or acquired, to raise us from the mire, That Wisdom wears, or take his treacherous staff Fit to be placed in that pure diadem; Then, not in vain, under these chesnut boughs To transports from the secondary founts * Compare "Despondency Corrected," Excursion, Book IV. (Vol. V. p. 188) "Within the soul a faculty abides," &c. -ED. Friendly; as here to my repose hath been This flowering broom's dear neighbourhood;* the light II. THE PINE OF MONTE MARIO AT ROME. [SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT told me that, when he first visited Italy, pine-trees of this species abounded, but that on his return thither, which was more than thirty years after, they had disappeared from many places where he had been accustomed to admire them, and had become rare all over the country, especially in and about Rome. Several Roman villas have within these few years passed into the hands of foreigners, who, I observed with pleasure, have taken care to plant this tree, which in course of years will become a great ornament to the city and to the general landscape. May I venture to add here, that having ascended the Monte Mario, I could not resist the embracing the trunk of this interesting monument of my departed * See the Fenwick note.-ED. + It would be ungenerous not to advert to the religious movement that, since the composition of these verses in 1837, has made itself felt, more or less strongly, throughout the English Church;-a movement that takes, for its first principle, a devout deference to the voice of Christian antiquity. It is not my office to pass judgment on questions of theological detail; but my own repugnance to the spirit and system of Romanism has been so repeatedly and, I trust, feelingly expressed, that I shall not be suspected of a leaning that way, if I do not join in the grave charge, thrown out, perhaps in the heat of controversy, against the learned and pious men to whose labours I allude. I speak apart from controversy; but, with strong faith in the moral temper which would elevate the present by doing reverence to the past, I would draw cheerful auguries for the English Church from this movement, as likely to restore among us a tone of piety more earnest and real than that produced by the mere formalities of the understanding, refusing, in a degree which I cannot but lament, that its own temper and judgment shall be controlled by those of antiquity.-W. W., 1842. The Monte Mario is to the north-west of Rome, beyond the Janiculus and the Vatican. The view from the summit embraces Rome, the Campagna, and the sea. It is capped by the villa Millini, in which the 'magnificent solitary pine-tree' of this sonnet still stands, amidst its cypress plantations.-Ed. friend's feelings for the beauties of nature, and the power of that art which he loved so much, and in the practice of which he was so distinguished.] I SAW far off the dark top of a Pine Look like a cloud-a slender stem the tie (Then first apparent from the Pincian Height) † III. AT ROME. [SIGHT is at first sight a sad enemy to imagination and to those pleasures belonging to old times with which some exertions of that power will always mingle: nothing perhaps brings this truth home to the feelings more than the city of Rome; not so much in respect to * "It was Mr Theed, the sculptor, who informed us of the pine-tree being the gift of Sir George Beaumont."-H. C. Robinson. (See Memoirs of W. W., Vol. II. p. 330).-ED. From the Mons Pincius, "collis hortorum," where were the gardens of Lucullus, there is a remarkable view of modern Rome.-ED. Within a couple of hours of my arrival at Rome, I saw from Monte Pincio the Pine-tree as described in the sonnet; and, while expressing admiration at the beauty of its appearance, I was told by an acquaintance of my fellow-traveller, who happened to join us at the moment, that a price had been paid for it by the late Sir G. Beaumont, upon condition that the proprietor should not act upon his known intention of cutting it down.-W. W. the impression made at the moment when it is first seen and looked at as a whole, for then the imagination may be invigorated and the mind's eye quickened; but when particular spots or objects are sought out, disappointment is I believe invariably felt. Ability to recover from this disappointment will exist in proportion to knowledge, and the power of the mind to reconstruct out of fragments and parts, and to make details in the present subservient to more adequate comprehension of the past.] Is this, ye Gods, the Capitolian Hill? Yon petty Steep in truth the fearful Rock, Change, with a brow not insolent, though stern. IV. AT ROME-REGRETS.-IN ALLUSION TO NIEBUHR AND OTHER MODERN HISTORIANS. THOSE old credulities, to nature dear, Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock 'Mid a dry desert? What is it we hear? * The Tarpeian rock, from which those condemned to death were hurled, is not now precipitous, as it used to be: the ground having been much raised by successive heaps of ruin.—ED. The glory of Infant Rome must disappear,* V. CONTINUED. COMPLACENT Fictions were they, yet the same To greet with instant faith their loftiest claim. For the blood-thirsty mead of Odin's riotous Hall. * Niebuhr, in his Lectures on Roman History (1826-29), was one of the first to point out the legendary character of much of the earlier history, and its "historical impossibility." He explained the way in which much of it had originated in family and national vanity, &c.-ED. |