ORFEO:

TO SIGNORINA GIULIA RAVOGLI.

I.

ང.

NELLA TRISTA VALLE.

Dark-headed Poet, wanderer of the lute,
With thy young lover's voice so fresh in woe
For passion of three thousand years ago,
When do we find thee sweetest? In pursuit
Of thy Eurydice; or in thy mute

Rapture at finding her, when thou dost throw
Thy scarf about her, and compel her so
Unseen to fondle thee? Or in thy suit
To Pluto? Nay, I think, we love thee most
Bearing thy limpid music through the host
Of chaos, till the roar begins to wane;
For thou deliverest the fiends from pain
With thy soft motions, and henceforth for aye
We shall see Hades, Orpheus standing by.

CHE FARÒ SENZ' EURYDICE?

Thou bendest o'er the spouse, whom thou hast sped
Through thine eyes' lust to death: a moment's vast
Content comes o'er thee; for at length thou hast
Thy glut of gazing; over breast and head
Awhile thou breathest satiate, till the dead
Brows pierce thee with their ice. To see thee cast

Thy cloak across the couch, and then at last,
As any mourner, sit across the bed
And say that she is gone-Where wilt thou go,
What wilt thou do without her? So we clung
About our dead, and sobbed, and did not know
Why we were left to live. This is not song;
But something that strikes through us every day
The mortal silence passes on its way.

III.

EURYDICE, RESPICE.

Thy lady dies of thy forbidden gaze,

And thou art in thy loneness; then how vain

It is for thee to live! Lie down again,

And let thy heart break, while in new, strange ways
The liberal music modulates to praise.

So would'st thou, so thou dost; thou canst not feign,
Nor turn thee to the wife whom thou hast slain;
Though Eros thy self-smiting hand delays,
And Paphian chorus becks thee to delight.
Thy bride revives; but thou hast lost the will
To bear her back to earth again. How slight
Are thy caresses, how infirm thy song!
And yet how finer than art's finest skill
This inability to do her wrong.

DEL DOLOR L'ORA E VENUTA.

The Thracian women could not bear thy wail,

Thy sighs for one re-iterated name;

They dashed thy lyre from thee, they dashed thy frame

To pieces! Ah, not so would we prevail,

Though wrathfully we dote on thee, thou pale
Dark Poet, for the darkness and the flame
Of hair and eyes; yea, love thee with the same
Delight and torture of thine own love-tale,
Love thee as thy voice loves Eurydice:
And thou art fading from us, thou art gone.
What can we do, since life still lingers on
Without thy song, but o'er its echoes rave
And sigh exultant, trembling for the brave
Lone journey to the shadows and to thee?
Dec. 1890.

MICHAEL FIELD.

NOTE UPON THE PICTURE OF
"A ROMAN LADY IN THE DE-
CADENCE OF THE EMPIRE,"
BY G. F. WATTS, R.A.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his fourth discourse, has drawn a very judicious distinction between the ornamental, and the grand, manners of painting. Since the time of Reynolds, there has entered into the art of Europe a method of design, which stands in a more violent contrast to these, than they to one another. Sir Joshua sought only to distinguish between the manners of certain Venetian, and Roman, painters: between the manner of Tintoret, for example, and the manner of Raphael. He was concerned only with the Attic and the Asiatic in art, to use the language of a writer of our own time; but we have to consider, in addition to these, the Corinthian manner. This is the manner of our age; our writings, our pictures, our music, our buildings, every where demonstrate it. In its architecture, the artistic spirit of an age is always most clearly shown and in our own architecture, we see how the proportion and due relation of the parts, with all the qualities, which are requisite for erudite composition, and of the value of which even the medieval builders were conscious, are by us ignored, or mistaken. The art of architecture, as we popularly understand it to-day, is the art of accumulating the greatest amount of detail in every available space. Is this, then, a true indication of the nature of our art: and are its finest, its esoteric, productions but Asiatic at the best; not Attic; not, as Sir Joshua would have expressed it, in the grand manner?

But the Attic, and the grand, manners, you interrupt, these are not convertible expressions. Surely a distinction is to be drawn between them; a real, and important, distinction. Is not the Attic manner natural and human; while the grand manner, as elaborated in the Roman School, but a series of effete conventions? And did not these moribund conventions occupy the last century, to the exclusion of all natural feeling: and did not the effort to be free of them, lead to what pleased to call the Corinthian, in modern art? Perhaps that is so it is, at least, the current and popular notion. But we are yet conscious of that reaction from the influences of

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