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CORINNE’S CHANT IN THE VICINITY OF NAPLES.
Ay, Nature, History and Poesie,
Rival each other's greatness:—here the eye
Sweeps with a glance, all wonders and all time.
A dead volcano now, I see thy lake
Avernus, with the fear-inspiring waves
Acheron, and Phlégeton boiling up
With subterranean flame: these are the streams
Of that old hell Aeneas visited.
Fire, the devouring life which first creates
The world which it consumes, struck terror most
When least its laws were known.—Ah! Nature then
Reveal'd her secrets but to Poetry.
The town of Cuma and the Sibyl's cave,
The temple of Apollo mark'd this height;
Here is the wood where grew the bough of gold.
The country of the Æneid is around;
The fables genius consecrated here
Are memories whose traces still we seek.
A Triton has beneath these billows plunged
The daring Trojan, who in song defied
The sea divinities: still are the rocks
Hollow and sounding, such as Virgil told.
Imagination's truth is from its power:
Man's genius can create when nature's felt;
He copies when he deems that he invents.
Amid these masses, terrible and old,
Creation's witnesses, you see arise
A younger hill of the volcano born:
For here the earth is stormy as the sea,
But doth not, like the sea, peaceful return
Within its bounds: the heavy element,
Upshaken by the tremulous abyss,
Digs valleys, and rears mountains; while the waves,
Harden'd to stone, attest the storms which rend
Her depths; strike now upon the earth,
You hear the subterranean vault resound.
It is as if the ground on which we dwell
