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- Of all my dreams by night and day,
- One dream will evermore return,
- The dream of Italy in May;
- The sky a brimming azure urn
- Where lights of amber brood and burn;
- The doves about San Marco's square,
- The swimming Campanile tower,
- The giants, hammering out the hour,
- The palaces, the bright lagoons,
- The gondolas gliding here and there
- Upon the tide that sways and swoons.
- The domes of San Antonio,
- Where Padua 'mid her mulberry-trees
- Reclines; Adige's crescent flow
- Beneath Verona's balconies;
- Rich Florence of the Medicis;
- Sienna's starlike streets that climb
- From hill to hill; Assisi well
- Remembering the holy spell
- Of rapt St. Francis; with her crown
- Of battlements, embossed by time,
- Stern old Perugia looking down.
- Then, mother of great empires, Rome,
- City of the majestic past,
- That o'er far leagues of alien foam
- The shodows of her eagles cast,
- Imperious still; impending, vast,
- The Colosseums's curving line;
- Pillar and arch and colonnade;
- St. Peter's consecrated shade,
- And Hadrian's tomb where Tiber strays;
- The ruins of the Palatine
- With all their memories of dead days.
- And Naples, with her sapphire arc
- Of bay, her perfect sweep of shore;
- Above her, like a demon stark,
- The dark fire-mountain evermore
- Looming protentous, as of yore;
- Fair Capri with her cliffs and caves;
- Salerno drowsing 'mid her vines
- And olives, and the shattered shrines
- Of Pæstum where the gray ghosts tread,
- And where the wilding rose still waves
- As when by Greek girls garlanded.
- But hark! What sound the ear dismays,
- Mine Italy, mine Italy?
- Thou that wert wrapt in peace, the haze
- Of loveliness spread over thee!
- Yet since the grapple needs must be,
- I who have wandered in the night
- With Dante, Petrarch's Laura known,
- Seen Vallombrosa's groves breeze-blown,
- Met Angelo and Raffael,
- Against iconoclastic might
- In this grim hour must wish thee well!
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