XXXIII.

This time we'll shoot better game and bag 'em hot-
No mere display at the stone of Dante,
But a kind of sober Witanagemot

(Ex: "Casa Guidi," quod videas ante)
Shall ponder, once Freedom restored to Florence,
How Art may return that departed with her.
Go, hated house, go each trace of the Loraine's,
And bring us the days of Orgagna hither!

XXXIV.

How we shall prologize, how we shall perorate,
Utter fit things upon art and history,

Feel truth at blood-heat and falsehood at zero rate,
Make of the want of the age no mystery;
Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras,

260

Show monarchy ever its uncouth cub licks 270 Out of the bear's shape into Chimæra's,

While Pure Art's birth is still the republic's.

XXXV.

Then one shall propose in a speech (curt Tuscan,
Expurgate and sober, with scarcely an "issimo,”)
To end now our half-told tale of Cambuscan,
And turn the bell-tower's alt to altissimo:
And fine as the beak of a young beccaccia
The Campanile, the Duomo's fit ally,
Shall soar up in gold full fifty braccia,
Completing Florence, as Florence Italy.

XXXVI.

Shall I be alive that morning the scaffold
Is broken away, and the long-pent fire,

280

Like the golden hope of the world, unbaffled
Springs from its sleep, and up goes the spire
While God and the People" plain for its motto,
Thence the new tricolor flaps at the sky ?
At least to foresee that glory of Giotto
And Florence together, the first am I !

"DE GUSTIBUS ""

1855

I.

YOUR ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (If our loves remain)

In an English lane,

By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice —
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say, —

The happier they !

Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
With the bean-flowers' boon,

And the blackbird's tune,
And May, and June!

What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled,

In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth

O' the grave, and loose my spirit's bands,
And come again to the land of lands)

In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree - 't is a cypress — stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands

To the water's edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, for ever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And there's news to-day ·
says
the king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,

Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:

She hopes they have not caught the felons.

Italy, my Italy!

Queen Mary's saying serves for me

(When fortune's malice

Lost her Calais)

Such lovers old are I and she:

So it always was, so shal' ever be !

20

30

40

HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD.

1845

1.

Oн, to be in England
Now that April's there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England -
now!

II.

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! 10 Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops at the bent spray's edgeThat's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice

over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower

-

Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

20

D. L.-5

HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM THE SEA.

NOBLY, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away;

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;

Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar

lay;

In the dimmest North-east distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;

"Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?"—say,

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,

While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

SAUL.
1845.

I.

SAID Abner, "At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou speak,

Kiss my cheek, wish me well !" Then I wished it, and did kiss his cheek.

And he, "Since the King, O my friend, for thy countenance sent,

Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent

'Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth

yet,