No more the waves are cumbered
With her galleys bold and free;
For her days of pride are numbered,

And she rules no more the sea.
Her sword has left her keeping,
Her prows forget the tide,
And the Adriatic weeping

Wails round his mourning bride.

VIII.

Gloomy, the proud Venetian

Surveys his father's halls, Where the fading hues of Titian

Yet light the mouldering walls. For they look reproach and sorrow, They dreamed not the disgrace That would darken o'er the morrow Of the once Patrician race. In those straits is desolation,

And darkness and dismay

Venice, no more a nation,

Has owned the stranger's sway.

THE MYTHOLOGIST.

A FRAGMENT.

I.

ASTRIDE a stone, an urchin sate,
It was a granite grey,

The shaft of a broken pillar, that
Across the desert lay,

And from the heathen hieroglyph

He scraped the moss away.

II.

In the city of the hundred gates,

How should an urchin be,

Where there is neither tent nor kin,
Nor shade of acacia tree,

But the lost lyre of the Memnon moans
Softly and solemnly?

III.

The city of the hundred gates!
The column and the fane,
They look as sad as if they had

In a place of burial lain;
And the hand of the exhumer

Had raised them up again.

He hath scooped the head of an ibis, and

VIII.

Upon the shaft in low relief,

Against the giant stone,

The ibis and the asphodel

And an old Osiris shone,

And the coil of the serpent-god was there,

And the pale Myronymon.

IX.

An earthen urn the Nubian took,

And through a wasted pile

Ran to the gleaming waters of

The venerable Nile,

Whilst from the flags crept lazily

The heavy crocodile !

X.

Thrice in the stream he dipped the vase,

And thrice the water threw

Over his forehead, and again

The sacred pitcher drew

Under the marge, where tremblingly

The mystic lotus grew.

XI.

Then lightly to the column hied,

What wills the Nubian there?

The dew fell thick, from a broken cloud, Cheerless and cold to bear;

And the stars were stealing, one by one,

Into the evening air.

XII.

He laved from the hollow of his hand

The grey and storied shaft, And of the cooling pitcher

In languid leisure quaffed,

And rolled him on the yellow sand,

And lustily he laughed.

XIII.

Sleep came upon the Nubian boy :
Like the coil of a snake he twined
His elfish limbs, and on his feet
His circling head reclined;

He lay, like a load, upon the sand,
Which a pilgrim had left behind.

XIV.

The fearful form of a mummied one

Upon his vision stole,

And from its breast the serecloth did

All curiously unrol;

And the still gaze of the lifeless looked Into his very soul.

XV.

It raised the dead-band upward,

And o'er the urchin bent,

The figured and folded fathoms rose

In many a mournful rent,

And it swathed around the Nubian boy The yellow cerement.