The silence of the place was like a sleep,
  So full of rest it seemed; each passing tread
Was a reverberation from the deep
  Recesses of the ages that are dead.

For, more than thirteen centuries ago,
  Benedict fleeing from the gates of Rome,
A youth disgusted with its vice and woe,
  Sought in these mountain solitudes a home.

He founded here his Convent and his Rule
  Of prayer and work, and counted work as prayer;
The pen became a clarion, and his school
  Flamed like a beacon in the midnight air.

What though Boccaccio, in his reckless way,
  Mocking the lazy brotherhood, deplores
The illuminated manuscripts, that lay
  Torn and neglected on the dusty floors?

Boccaccio was a novelist, a child
  Of fancy and of fiction at the best! 
This the urbane librarian said, and smiled
  Incredulous, as at some idle jest.

Upon such themes as these, with one young friar
  I sat conversing late into the night,
Till in its cavernous chimney the woodfire
  Had burnt its heart out like an anchorite.

And then translated, in my convent cell,
  Myself yet not myself, in dreams I lay,
And, as a monk who hears the matin bell,
  Started from sleep; already it was day.

From the high window I beheld the scene
  On which Saint Benedict so oft had gazed,—­
The mountains and the valley in the sheen
  Of the bright sun,—­and stood as one amazed.

Gray mists were rolling, rising, vanishing;
  The woodlands glistened with their jewelled crowns;
Far off the mellow bells began to ring
  For matins in the half-awakened towns.

The conflict of the Present and the Past,
  The ideal and the actual in our life,
As on a field of battle held me fast,
  Where this world and the next world were at strife.

For, as the valley from its sleep awoke,
  I saw the iron horses of the steam
Toss to the morning air their plumes of smoke,
  And woke, as one awaketh from a dream.

AMALFI

Sweet the memory is to me
Of a land beyond the sea,
Where the waves and mountains meet,
Where, amid her mulberry-trees
Sits Amalfi in the heat,
Bathing ever her white feet
In the tideless summer seas.

In the middle of the town,
From its fountains in the hills,
Tumbling through the narrow gorge,
The Canneto rushes down,
Turns the great wheels of the mills,
Lifts the hammers of the forge.

’T is a stairway, not a street,
That ascends the deep ravine,
Where the torrent leaps between
Rocky walls that almost meet. 
Toiling up from stair to stair
Peasant girls their burdens bear;
Sunburnt daughters of the soil,
Stately figures tall and straight,
What inexorable fate
Dooms them to this life of toil?