well have satisfied our imagination and our heart--if
high emotions were not uncontrollable and omnipotent--wafted away by
Fancy with the speed of Fire--lakes, groves, cliffs, mountains, all
forgotten--and alight amid an aerial host of figures, human and divine,
on a spire that seeks the sky. How still those imaged sanctities and
purities, all white as snows of Apennine, stand in the heavenly region,
circle above circle, and crowned as with a zone of stars! They are
imbued with life. In their animation the figures of angels and saints,
insensate stones no more, seem to feel the Eclipse that shadows them,
and look awful in the portentous light. In his inspiration he transcends
the grandeur even of that moment's vision--and beholds in the visages of
that aerial host those of the sons of heaven darkening with celestial
sorrow at the Fall of Man--when

"Throngs of celestial visages,
Darkening like water in the breeze,
A holy sadness shared."

Never since the day on which the wondrous edifice, in its consummate
glory, first saluted the sun, had it inspired in the soul of kneeling
saint a thought so sad and so sublime--a thought beyond the reaches of
the soul of him whose genius bade it bear up all its holy adornments so
far from earth, that the silent company seem sometimes, as light and
shadow moves among them, to be in ascension to heaven. But the Sun
begins again to look like the Sun, and the poet, relieved by the joyful
light from that awful trance, delights to behold

"Town and Tower,
The Vineyard and the Olive Bower,
Their lustre re-assume;"

and "breathes there a man with soul so dead," that it burns not within
him as he hears the heart of the husband and the father breathe forth
its love and its fear, remembering on a sudden the far distant whom it
has never forgotten--a love and a fear that saddens, but disturbs not,
for the vision he saw had inspired him with a trust in the tender
mercies of God? Commit to faithful memory, O Friend! who may some time
or other be a traveller over the wide world, the sacred stanzas that
bring the Poem to a close--and it will not fail to comfort thee when
sitting all alone by the well in the wilderness, or walking along the
strange streets of foreign cities, or lying in thy cot at midnight
afloat on far-off seas.

"O ye, who guard and grace my Home
While in far-distant lands we roam,
Was such a vision given to you?
Or, whi