XXI

Lo, we confront the wisest of mankind,
The glory of old Athens and her shame;
The image of divinity enshrined
Within the lowliest temple, who doth claim
A memory that mocks the trump of fame,
Embodied virtue, Socrates the wise;
He who proved human wisdom was a name;
Who saw humanity in naked guise,
Stripped of its shreds and gauds and sophist-vanities.

XXII

What genius dwells beneath those satyr brows?
What inward light do those dull eyes betray?
The sensual lip life's coarsest type avows;
Yet o'er that face doth mind in lightnings play,
For God woke in him the ethereal ray
Of soul that felt its immortality,
Even in his demon's spiritual sway;
Calm in his central path of purity,
He left his deathless record how to live and die.

XXIII

Inspiring spirit, ruling from the dead,
Divinest Plato! do we gaze on thee,
Thou, throned apart o'er vaporous ages fled,
A substant and eternal memory.
Until a holier was sent from high,
Thou wert the one ordained, sole harbinger
Of truth revealing triad deity;
Of the man fall'n from his ascendant star;
Of heaven remembered still, the light still seen from far.

XXIV

Lo, girt with mountain solitudes, the stream
Dashed at his feet, the leopard's skin his dress,
Roused from his rock by an inspiring dream,
The embodied " Voice within the wilderness;"
His eyes shoot forth the lightning consciousness
Of prescience piercing through the cloudier years;
His opening lips the mighty truths confess;
The startled soul his thrilling warning hears,
" Prepare, make straight the way! a god — a god appears."

XXV

And in that form immortal life is moulded,
On that clear forehead star-like faith is sealed;
The flower-like blossoming of truth unfolded,
In his refulgent boyhood is revealed.
Who would not rather, glorious spirit! healed
From mortal sin, prove, standing there as thou,
The grandeur of thy innocence, than wield
Power before which the prostrate world should bow,
Crowns which, compared with thine, are dross upon the brow?

XXVI

Yet pass not, watching o'er Lorenzo's tomb,
Thy Day and Night, sublimest Angelo!
Eldest of Powers, ye see the gathering gloom
Of crowning darkness round her forehead grow.
She sleeps, and must not be aroused, for, lo!
The Titan Day his robe aside hath hurled,
On his supporting arm uprising slow;
Beneath his eyes clouds part like banners furled;
Light flashing from their orbs awakes the distant world.

XXVII

Altar of human dust! thy sanctities
Time-hallowed, are with our religion wrought.
Even to thy sacred name the heart replies,
Grey Santa Croce! holy is the spot
Whose memories are fountains of our thought,
Whose life the future as the past inspires;
Mecca of pilgrimage! that shall be sought
By those who reverence ashes lit with fires
Deathless as those that shine amid the starry choirs.

XXVIII

Here rest the bones of Angelo; upon
That brow divinity the signet seals
Of the prophetic prescience that hath shone;
His eye the delegated power reveals
Of genius, at whose altar the world kneels;
There the will sits enthroned in its repose;
The thought that in its stillness depth conceals;
The light august that o'er each feature throws
The harmony that from the inner mind o'erflows.

XXIX

Art's triad elements, ray-like gathering, joined
Central in him; creator of winged things
And forms that left our breathing world behind,
Titanic growths of faith's imaginings.
Great Day and Night, beside their secret springs,
He bodied into life; the judgment saw,
Heaven's glories, and the damned sufferings,
And that stern Hebrew Seer, when to the law
And Sinai's thunders knelt the idolaters in awe.

XXX

Seek not within those dark and marble cells
His grave and monument; he sleeps not there:
His sun-like spirit in the present dwells;
Earth's mightiest altar-place his tomb doth bear,
In yon orbed dome hung floating as on air;
There rules the mind of him who erewhile trod
With men, ordained their common fate to share,
Their petty grief's ordeal, till from the sod
The disembodied soul should, rising, walk with God.