Land of perpetual summer, Italy

Land of perpetual summer, Italy
Land of the golden City of the sun
Cradle of Europe’s Empire — but for thee
The rest were darkness & perpetual dun
Celestial clime & garden of the sun

Country of Virgil Hessiod — once the free
Latium & Greece both kingdoms of the sun
Their infant cradles rocked by Liberty
& still the sunniest Land is Italy

Greece Land of Homer & the muses fire
How nations read & kindle at thy name
The freeman’s sword the poet’s native lyre
Have filled thy history with a classic fame
& is not Greece, that Land of Isles, the same?

The sun shines o’er its freedom & wars cease
The despot’s chains near made it stoop to shame
Its hills & classic skys repose in peace
& freedom owns it as the soil of Greece

An early Northampton Asylum poem from 1842
(for Simona in Ancona, in the “Land of perpetual summer”)