Monte Circello.

CIRCELLO.

HEY skirt the nearest shores to Circe's land,

THEY

Where she, the sumptuous daughter of the Sun,
Fills her secluded forests with the sounds
Of her assiduous singing, while within

Her palace proud the fragrant cedar burns,
Her nightly torch; and through her gauzy web
The whistling shuttle runs. Here, late at night,
The roar of angry lions in the dark

Chafing against their prison bars, was heard;
And bristly boars and raging bears, pent up,
And howling wolves of size immense. All these,
From human shapes, by means of potent herbs,
The cruel goddess Circe had transformed

To faces and to bodies of wild beasts.
Then, lest the pious Trojans should endure
Such monstrous fate, when brought into the port,
Nor touch a coast so dreadful, Neptune filled
Their sails with favoring winds, to aid their flight,
And wafted them beyond the boiling shoals.

Virgil. Tr. C. P. Cranch.

MONTE CIRCELLO.

WHAT time,

In hours of summer, sad with so much light,

The sun beats ceaselessly upon the fields,

The harvesters, as famine urges them,
Draw hitherward in thousands, and they wear
The look of those that dolorously go

In exile, and already their brown eyes
Are heavy with the poison of the air.
Here never note of amorous bird consoles
Their drooping hearts; here never the gay songs
Of their Abruzzi sound to gladden these
Pathetic bands. But taciturn they toil,
Reaping the harvests for their unknown lords;
And when the weary labor is performed,
Taciturn they retire; and not till then

And dying,

Their bagpipes crown the joys of the return,
Swelling the heart with their familiar strain.
Alas! not all return, for there is one
That dying in the furrow sits, and seeks
With his last look some faithful kinsman out,
To give his life's wage, that he carry it
Unto his trembling mother, with the last
Words of her son that comes no more.
Deserted and alone, far off he hears
His comrades going, with their pipes in time
Joyfully measuring their homeward steps.
And when in after years an orphan comes
To reap the harvest here, and feels his blade
Go quivering through the swaths of falling grain,
He weeps and thinks: haply these heavy stalks
Ripened on his unburied father's bones.

Aleardo Aleardi, Tr. W. D. Howells.

WH

Monte Gargano.

MONTE GARGANO.

HERE, through Gargano's woody dells,
O'er bending oaks the north-wind swells,

A sainted hermit's lowly tomb

Is bosomed in umbrageous gloom,

In shades that saw him live and die
Beneath their waving canopy.

'Twas his, as legends tell, to share
The converse of immortals there;
Around that dweller of the wild
There "bright appearances" have smiled,
And angel wings at eve have been
Gleaming the shadowy boughs between.
And oft from that secluded bower
Hath breathed, at midnight's calmer hour,
A swell of viewless harps, a sound
Of warbled anthems pealing round.
O, none but voices of the sky
Might wake that thrilling harmony,
Whose tones, whose very echoes, made
An Eden of the lonely shade!
Years have gone by; the hermit sleeps
Amidst Gargano's woods and steeps;
Ivy and flowers have half o'ergrown
And veiled his low sepulchral stone:
Yet still the spot is holy, still

Celestial footsteps haunt the hill;
And oft the awe-struck mountaineer
Aerial vesper-hymns may hear
Around those forest-precincts float,
Soft, solemn, clear, but still remote.
Oft will Affliction breathe her plaint
To that rude shrine's departed saint,
And deem that spirits of the blest

There shed sweet influence o'er her breast.

Felicia Hemans.

Montepulciano.

MONTEPULCIANO WINE.

EARKEN, all earth!

HEAR

We, Bacchus, in the might of our great mirth, To all who reverence us, and are right thinkers; Hear, all ye drinkers!

Give ear, and give faith, to our edict divine, -
Moltepulciano's the King of all Wine!

At these glad sounds,

The Nymphs, in giddy rounds,

Shaking their ivy diadems and grapes,
Echoed the triumph in a thousand shapes.
The Satyrs would have joined them; but alas!
They could n't; for they lay about the grass,
As drunk as apes.

Francesco Redi. Tr. Leigh Hunt.

FAIR

Naples.

NAPLES.

AIR stand the peopled towns: by Phoebus' fane Auspicious graced, walls rose beside the main: Puteoli spreads smooth its haven's sand,

And shores, the shelter of the world, expand.
Here Capua's streets with Rome imperial vie,
Where Capys fixed his Trojan colony:
Near lies the native city of my love;
The mild soil Phoebus, by the guiding dove,
Showed to Parthenope; the siren maid

Crossed the wide seas, and here her Naples laid.
Hither I seek to bear thee: not my race

Springs from wild Lybia, nor from barbarous Thrace.
Tempered by breezy summers, winters bland,
The waveless seas glide slumbering to the land :
Safe peace is here; life's careless ease is ours;
Unbroken rest, and sleep till morning hours.
No courts here rage; no bickering brawls are known:
The laws of men are in their manners shown;
And Justice walks unguarded and alone.

Nor less the various charms of life are found

Where the wide champaign spreads its distant bound: Whether thou haunt warm Baia's streaming shore, Or the prophetic sibyl's cave explore;

Or mount, made famous by Misenus' oar;