On Seeing the Elgin Marbles. By John Keats. 1817

Image from http://www.hammerwood.mistral.co.uk/posiedon.jpg

The Elgin Marbles, known also as the Parthenon Marbles, are a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures, inscriptions and architectural members that originally were part of the Parthenon  and other buildings on the Acropolis of Athens. 

(Wikipedia.org)

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Image from http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/

My spirit is too weak –mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

Yet´tis a gentle luxury to weep

That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,

Fresh for the opening of the morning´s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old Time –with a billowy main-

A sun –a shadow of a magnitude.

Reference

The Literature of England. By George K. Anderson and William E. Buckler. USA 1966