Where giant god-trees rear their temples dim. 
Still speed thy truth!—­still wave thy spirit sword, Till every land acknowledge Thee the Lord, And the broad banner of the Cross, unfurled In triumph, wave above a subject world.  And here O God! where feuds thy church divide—­ The sectary’s rancor, and the bigot’s pride—­ Melt every heart, till all our breasts enshrine One faith, one hope, one love, one zeal divine, And, with one voice, adoring nations call Upon the Father and the God of all.

[Footnote A:  The Pantheon that was built to all the gods was transformed into a Christian temple.]

THE INFANT ST. JOHN, THE BAPTIST.

O sweeter than the breath of southern wind
  With all its perfumes is the whisper’d prayer
From infant lips, and gentler than the hind,
              The feet that bear
  The heaven-directed youth in wisdom’s pathway fair.

And thou, the early consecrate, like flowers
  Didst shed thy incense breath to heaven abroad;
And prayer and praise the measure of thy hours,
              The desert trod
  Companionless, alone, save of the mighty God.

As Phosphor leads the kindling glory on,
  And fades, lost in the day-god’s bright excess,
So didst thou in Redemption’s coming dawn,
              Grow lustreless,
  The fading herald of the Sun of Righteousness.

But when the book of life shall be unsealed,
  And stars of glory round the throne divine
In all their light and beauty be revealed,
              The brightest thine
  Of all the hosts of earth with heavenly light shall shine.

SHELLEY’S OBSEQUIES.

Ibi tu calentem
Debita sparges lacryma favillam
Vatis amici.

—­Horace.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, an eminent English poet, while sailing in the Mediterranean sea, in 1822, was drowned off the coast of Tuscany in a squall which wrecked the boat in which he had embarked.  Two weeks afterwards his body was washed ashore.  The Tuscan quarantine regulations at that time required that whatever came ashore from the sea should be burned.  Shelley’s body was accordingly placed on a pyre and reduced to ashes, in the presence of Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, who are the “brother bards” referred to in the last stanza of the poem.

Beneath the axle of departing day
  The weary waters on the horizon’s verge
Blush’d like the cheek of children tired in play,
  As bore the surge
The poet’s wasted form with slow and mournful dirge.

On Via Reggio’s surf-beaten strand
  The late-relenting sea, with hollow moan
Gave back the storm-tossed body to the land,
  As if in tone
Of sorrow it bewailed the deed itself had done.

There laid upon his bed of shells—­around
  The moon and stars their lonely vigils kept;
While in their pall-like shades the mountains bound
  And night bewept
The bard of nature as in death’s cold arms he slept.