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| FLORENCE! the name sounds sweetly to my ear, | |
| Familiar and yet strange; on dear home lips | |
| ’T is music, and from Tuscan tongue it slips | |
| Like dropping honey, syllabled and clear. | |
| |
| My name, yet not my name! Myself forgot, | 5 |
| Hither I turn my eager steps, to seek | |
| The air those great ones breathed, whom I, though weak, | |
| May follow worshipping, attaining not! | |
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| What is there homelike in the flower-girt place? | |
| Why smiles the Arno, while the encircling hills | 10 |
| Enwrap me closer, and my spirit thrills | |
| With a vague joy whose springs I cannot trace? | |
| |
| Oft have I mused on the old glorious time, | |
| When painters drew with pencils dipped in flame; | |
| When genius reigned, and tyrants writhed in shame | 15 |
| ’Neath Dante’s twisted scourge of threefold rhyme. | |
| |
| And, meditating thus, while reverence grew | |
| To love, and love to self-forgetfulness, | |
| While fancy wandered, may my steps no less | |
| Have followed, dreaming, farther than I knew? | 20 |
| |
| And yet, not so. This is no foreign air, | |
| That once I breathed, then left, again to roam! | |
| Thy fragrant breezes whisper, “This is home,— | |
| My namesake city, Florence, called the Fair!” | |
| |
| Sometimes in music comes a sudden strain, | 25 |
| Mid unfamiliar melodies most sweet; | |
| The heart leaps forth the welcome tones to greet, | |
| But its past echo memory seeks in vain. | |
| |
| New, and yet old, it lingers on the mind | |
| As with remembered sweetness, and it fills | 30 |
| The soul with longing for the heavenly hills, | |
| And angel harmonies it left behind. | |
| |
| Perchance ’t was wafted o’er the ocean dim | |
| That lies beyond the mystery of birth; | |
| And the young spirit, mid the songs of earth, | 35 |
| Could not forget the seraph’s cradle hymn! | |
| |
| Whate’er the heart is tuned to is its own, | |
| And, loving, we claim kinship. So I love, | |
| O land! whose distant glories thus could move | |
| My heart until, unseen, I deemed thee known! | 40 |
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| In other climes thy skies have on me smiled, | |
| The beautiful to me has borne thy name; | |
| O city of my heart, thy love I claim,— | |
| I am not worthy, but I am thy child! | |
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