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Where the strong and the weak, this world's congeries,
Repeat in large what they practised in small,
Through life after life in unlimited series;
Only the scale's to be changed, that's all.

XXII.

Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen
By the means of Evil that Good is best,

And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven's

serene,

When our faith in the same has stood the test-
Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod,
The uses of labour are surely done;

There remaineth a rest for the people of God:
And I have had troubles enough, for one.

XXIII.

But at any rate I have loved the season
Of Art's spring-birth so dim and dewy;

My sculptor is Nicolo the Pisan,

My painter who but Cimabue?

Nor ever was man of them all indeed,

From these to Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo,
Could say that he missed my critic-meed.
So, now to my special grievance-heigh ho!

XXIV.

Their ghosts still stand, as I said before, Watching each fresco flaked and rasped, Blocked up, knocked out, or whitewashed o'er: -No getting again what the church has grasped! The works on the wall must take their chance; "Works never conceded to England's thick clime!" (I hope they prefer their inheritance

Of a bucketful of Italian quick-lime.)

XXV.

When they go at length, with such a shaking

Of heads o'er the old delusion, sadly

Each master his way through the black streets taking,
Where many a lost work breathes though badly—
Why don't they bethink them of who has merited?
Why not reveal, while their pictures dree
Such doom, how a captive might be out-ferreted?
Why is it they never remember me?

XXVI.

Not that I expect the great Bigordi,

Nor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose; Nor the wronged Lippino; and not a word I Say of a scrap of Frà Angelico's:

But are you too fine, Taddeo Gaddi,

To grant me a taste of your intonaco,

Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye? Not a churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco?

XXVII.

Could not the ghost with the close red cap,

My Pollajolo, the twice a craftsman,

Save me a sample, give me the hap

Of a muscular Christ that shows the draughtsman?

No Virgin by him the somewhat petty,

of finical touch and tempera crumblyCould not Alesso Baldovinetti

Contribute so much, I ask him humbly?

Margheritone of Arezzo,

XXVIII.

With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret (Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so,

You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?)

Not a poor glimmering Crucifixion,

Where in the foreground kneels the donor? If such remain, as is my conviction,

The hoarding it does you but little honour.

XXIX.

They pass; for them the panels may thrill,
The tempera grow alive and tinglish;
Their pictures are left to the mercies still

Of dealers and stealers, Jews and the English,
Who, seeing mere money's worth in their prize,
Will sell it to somebody calm as Zeno
At naked High Art, and in ecstacies
Before some clay-cold vile Carlino!

XXX.

No matter for these! But Giotto, you,

Have you allowed, as the town-tongues babble it,Oh, never! it shall not be counted true— That a certain precious little tablet Which Buonarroti eyed like a lover,— Was buried so long in oblivion's womb And, left for another than I to discover,

Turns up at last! and to whom?-to whom?

XXXI.

I, that have haunted the dim San Spirito,
(Or was it rather the Ognissanti?)
Patient on altar-step planting a weary toe!
Nay, I shall have it yet! Detur amanti!
My Koh-i-noor-or (if that's a platitude)
Jewel of Giamschid, the Persian Sofi's eye;
So, in anticipative gratitude,

What if I take up my hope and prophesy?

XXXII.

When the hour grows ripe, and a certain dotard

Is pitched, no parcel that needs invoicing,
To the worse side of the Mont St. Gothard,
We shall begin by way of rejoicing;

None of that shooting the sky (blank cartridge),
Nor a civic guard, all plumes and lacquer,
Hunting Radetzky's soul like a partridge
Over Morello with squib and cracker.

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 prologuize, 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,

Show-monarchy ever its uncouth cub licks

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-towers' 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,
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 tricolour flaps at the sky?
At least to foresee that glory of Giotto
And Florence together, the first am I!

"DE GUSTIBUS-"

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 beanflowers' boon,

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