Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around; Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned. Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these. Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas, Clothed around with the world's desire as with raiment and fair as the foam, And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess and mother of Rome. For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours, Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers, White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame, Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name. For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea. And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways, And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays. Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wist that ye should not fall. Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all. Why, by what power, for what reason, should the old gods have passed away? Even if one could not believe in them all, they were too beautiful to pass away and be broken, as their statues were broken by the early Christians in the rage of their ignorant and brutal zeal. The triumph of Christianity meant much more than the introduction of a new religion; it meant the destruction of priceless art and priceless literature, it signified the victory of barbarism over culture and refinement. Doubtless the change, like all great changes, was for the better in some ways; but no lover of art and the refinements of civilisation can read without regret the history of the iconoclasm in which the Christian fanatics indulged when they got the government and the law upon their side. It is this feeling of regret and horror that the poet well expresses through the mouth of the Roman who cares no more to live, because the gods and everything beautiful must pass away. But there is one goddess still left for him, one whom the Christians cannot break but who will at last break them and their religion, and scatter them as dust--the goddess of death. To her he turns with a last prayer: But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end; Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend. O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth, I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth. . . . . . . . . . Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;