The Kenosha telegraph. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1860-1888, 1875-02-04
NEW POEM BY LONGFELLOW
Monte Casino


Beautiful valley through whose verdant meads
Unheard the Garigliano glldes along,
The Liris, nurse of rushes and of reeds,
The river taciturn Of classic song
The Land of Labor, and the Land of Rest,
Where medieval towns are white on all
The hilsides, and where every mountain crest
Is an Etrurian or Roman wall! M
There is Alagna, where Pope Boniface
Was dragged with contumely from his throne,
Sciarra Colonna, that days disgrace
The Pontiff's only, or in part thine own ?
There in Ceprano, where a renegade
Was each Apulian, as great Dante saith,
When Manfred, by his men-at-arms betrayed,
Spurred on to Benevento and to DEATH
There is Aquinum, the old Volscian town
Where Juvenal was born, whose lurid light
Still hovers DER his birthplace like the crown
OF splendor over cities seen at night
Doubled the spendor is, that in its streets
The Angelic Doctor a school-boy played,
And dreamed, perhaps, the dream that he repeats
In pondrous folios for scholastcs made.
AM there, uplifted like passing cloud
That pauses on mountain summit high,
Monte Casinos convent rears it's proud
And venerable walls against the sky.
Well remember how on foot climbed
The stony pathway leading to its gate;
Below, the darkening town grew desolate.
Well remember the low arch and dark
The courtyard with its well, the terrace wide,
From which, far down, diminished to park,
The valley yelled in mist was dim deserted.
The day was dying and, with feeble hands,
Caressed the mountainous the wales between
Darkened; the river i'll the meadow-lands
Sheathed itself as sword and was not seen.
The silence of the place was like sleep,
So full Of rest it seemed; each passing tread
Was 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 disguised with its vice and woe,
Sought in these mountain solitudes home.
He founded here his Convent and his rule
Of prayer and work, and counted work as prayer
His pen became clarion, and his school
Flamed like beacon in the midnight air.
What though Boccaccio, in his reckless way
Mocklng the lazy brotherhood, deplOres
The illuminated manuscript 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
l sat conYersing late into the night,
Till in its cavernOus chimney the wood fire
Had burnt its heart out like an anchorite.
And then translated, in my convent CELL
Myself yet not myself, in dreams lay
And as a monk who hears the matin bell,
Started from sleep ALREADY it was day.
From the high window 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 jeweled crowns
Far OFF the mellow bells began to ring
For mathis in the alf-awakened towns.
The conflict of the Present and the Past,
The ideal and the actual in our life
AS on field of battle held me fast,
Where this world and the next world were at strife
For, as valley from it's sleep awoke,
saw the iron horses of the steam
Toss to the morning air their plumes of smoke,
And woke as one awaketh from dream.
atlantic Monthly for February.