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NUREMBERG.

IN the valley of the Pegnitz, where across broad

meadow-lands

Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremberg, the ancient, stands.

Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song,

Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like the rooks that round them throng :

Memories of the Middle Ages, when the Emperors, rough and bold,

Had their dwelling in thy castle, time-defying centuries old.

And thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted, in their uncouth rhyme,

That their great imperial city stretched its hand through every clime,

In the court-yard of the castle, bound with many an iron band,

Stands the mighty linden planted by Queen Cunigunde's hand;

On the square the oriel window, where in old heroic days

Sat the poet Melchior singing Kaiser Maximilian's praise.

Everywhere I see around me rise the wondrous

world of art;

Fountains wrought with richest sculpture standing in the common mart;

And above cathedral doorways saints and bishops carved in stone,

By a former age commissioned as apostles to

our own.

In the church of sainted Sebald sleeps enshrined his holy dust,

And in bronze the Twelve Apostles guard from age to age their trust;

In the church of sainted Lawrence stands a pix of sculpture rare,

Like the foamy sheaf of fountains, rising through the painted air.

C

POEMS.

Here, when art was still religion, with a simple

reverent heart,

Lived and laboured Albrecht Dürer, the Evangelist of art;

Hence in silence and in sorrow, toiling still with busy hand,

Like an emigrant he wandered, seeking for the Better Land.

Emigravit is the inscription on the tomb-stone

where he lies;

Dead he is not — but departed

for the artist

never dies.

Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair,

That he once has trod its pavement, that he once has breathed its air!

Through these streets so broad and stately, these obscure and dismal lanes,

Walked of yore the Master-Singers, chanting rude poetic strains.

From remote and sunless suburbs, came they to the friendly guild,

Building nests in Fame's great temple, as in spouts the swallows build.

As the weaver plied the shuttle, wove he to the mystic rhyme,

And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anvil's chime;

Thanking God, whose boundless wisdom makes the flowers of poesy bloom

In the forge's dust and cinders in the tissues of the loom.

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