How could I other? Was it not your test,

To try me, and what my love for Constance meant ?
Madam, your royal soul itself approves,

The first, that I should choose thus! so one takes
A beggar-asks him what would buy his child,
And then approves the expected laugh of scorn
Returned as something noble from the rags.

Speak, Constance, I'm the beggar! Ha, what's this?
You two glare each at each like panthers now.
Constance the world fades; only you stand there !
You did not in to-night's wild whirl of things
Sell me your soul of souls, for any price?
No-no-'tis easy to believe in you.
Was it your love's mad trial to o'ertop
Mine by this vain self-sacrifice? well, still-
Though I should curse, love you. I am love
And cannot change! love's self is at your feet.
[The QUEEN goes out.

CONSTANCE.

Feel my heart; let it die against your own!

NORBERT.

Against my own! explain not; let this be.

This is life's height.

CONSTANCE.

Yours! Yours ! Yours !

NORBERT.

You and I

Why care by what meanders we are here

In the centre of the labyrinth? men have died

Trying to find this place out, which we have found.

CONSTANCE.

Found, found!

NORBERT.

Sweet, never fear what she can do

We are past harm now.

CONSTANCE.

On the breast of God.

I thought of men-as if you were a man.
Tempting him with a crown!

It is too perfect!

NORBERT.

This must end here

CONSTANCE.

There's the music stopped.

What measured heavy tread? It is one blaze

About me and within me.

NORBERT.

Oh, some death

Will run its sudden finger round this spark,

And sever us from the rest

"DE GUSTIBUS—”

I.

Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees, (If 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 beanflowers' boon,

And the blackbird's tune,

And May, and June!

II.

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 cicalas die of drouth,
And one sharp tree ('tis 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 says there's news to-day—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.)

Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, "Italy."

Such lovers old are I and she;
So it always was, so shall ever be.

сс

PROTUS.

Among these latter busts we count by scores,
Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,

Each with his bay-leaf fillet, loose-thonged vest,
Loric and low-browed Gorgon on the breast,—
One loves a baby face, with violets there,
Violets instead of laurel in the hair,

As those were all the little locks could bear.

Now read here.

"Protus ends a period

Of empery beginning with a god,

Born in the porphyry chamber at Byzant;
Queens by his cradle, proud and ministrant :
And if he quickened breath there, 'twould like fire
Pantingly through the dim vast realm transpire.
A fame that he was missing, spread afar—
The world, from its four corners, rose in war,
Till he was borne out on a balcony

To pacify the world when it should see.

The captains ranged before him, one, his hand
Made baby points at, gained the chief command.
And day by day more beautiful he grew

In shape, all said, in feature and in hue,
While young Greek sculptors gazing on the child
Were, so, with old Greek sculpture, reconciled.
Already sages laboured to condense

In easy tomes a life's experience:
And artists took grave counsel to impart

In one breath and one hand-sweep, all their art-
To make his graces prompt as blossoming