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

210

Of a muscular Christ that shows the draughtsman ? No Virgin by him the somewhat petty,

of finical touch and tempera crumbly

Could 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 honor.

220

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 ecstasies
Before some clay-cold vile Carlino !

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,

230

Turns up at last! and to whom?—to whom? 240

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 Saint 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.

250

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 Chimera'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!

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 cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree - 't is a cypress
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o'ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands

- stands,

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

20

30

40

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 !