Above her grave,

and one remoter land,

Free as her prayers could make it, at their side.

I will not doubt the vision: yonder see
The moving clouds that speak of freedom won!
And life, new-lighted, with a lark-like glee
Through Casa Guidi windows hails the sun,
Grown from the rest her spirit gave to me.

BUT

THE VENUS DE' MEDICI.

Bayard Taylor.

UT Arno wins us to the fair white walls,
Where the Etrurian Athens claims and keeps

A softer feeling for her fairy halls.

Girt by her theatre of hills, she reaps
Her corn and wine and oil, and Plenty leaps
To laughing life, with her redundant horn.
Along the banks where smiling Arno sweeps
Was modern luxury of commerce born,

And buried learning rose, redeemed to a new morn.

There, too, the Goddess loves in stone, and fills
The air around with beauty; we inhale

The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils
Part of its immortality; the veil

Of heaven is half undrawn; within the pale

We stand, and in that form and face behold

What mind can make, when Nature's self would fail; And to the fond idolaters of old

Envy the innate flash which such a soul could mould.

We gaze and turn away, and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fulness; there, forever there,
Chained to the chariot of triumphal art,

We stand as captives, and would not depart.
Away! there need no words, nor terms precise,
The paltry jargon of the marble mart,

Where pedantry gulls folly, we have eyes:

Blood, pulse, and breast confirm the Dardan Shepherd's prize.

Appearedst thou not to Paris in this guise?
Or to more deeply blest Anchises? or,
In all thy perfect goddess-ship, when lies
Before thee thy own vanquished lord of war?
And gazing in thy face as toward a star,
Laid on thy lap, his eyes to thee upturn,
Feeding on thy sweet cheek! while thy lips are
With lava kisses melting while they burn,

Showered on his eyelids, brow, and mouth, as from

an urn!

Glowing, and circumfused in speechless love,

Their full divinity inadequate

That feeling to express, or to improve,

The gods become as mortals, and man's fate

Has moments like their brightest; but the weight Of earth recoils upon us; - let it go!

We can recall such visious, and create,

From what has been, or might be, things which grow Into thy statue's form, and look like gods below.

Lord Byron.

THE

OLD PICTURES IN FLORENCE.

HE morn when first it thunders in March, The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say. 'As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch

Of the villa-gate, this warm March day, No flash snapt, no dumb thunder rolled

In the valley beneath, where, white and wide, Washed by the morning's water-gold,

Florence lay out on the mountain-side.

River and bridge and street and square
Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,
Through the live translucent bath of air,
As the sights in a magic crystal ball.
And of all I saw and of all I praised,
The most to praise and the best to see,
Was the startling bell-tower Giotto raised:
But why did it more than startle me?

Giotto, how, with that soul of yours,
Could you play me false who loved you so?
Some slights if a certain heart endures

It feels, I would have your fellows know!
Faith, I perceive not why I should care

To break a silence that suits them best, But the thing grows somewhat hard to bear When I find a Giotto join the rest.

On the arch where olives overhead

Print the blue sky with twig and leaf

(That sharp-curled leaf they never shed),
"Twixt the aloes I used to lean in chief,
And mark through the winter afternoons,

By a gift God grants me now and then,
In the mild decline of those suns like moons,
Who walked in Florence, besides her men.
They might chirp and chaffer, come and go
For pleasure or profit, her men alive,
My business was hardly with them, I trow,
But with empty cells of the human hive;
With the chapter-room, the cloister-porch,
The church's apsis, aisle or nave,

Its crypt, one fingers along with a torch,
Its face, set full for the sun to shave.
Wherever a fresco peels and drops,

Wherever an outline weakens and wanes Till the latest life in the painting stops, Stands one whom each fainter pulse-tick pains! One, wishful each scrap should clutch its brick, Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster, A lion who dies of an ass's kick,

The wronged great soul of an ancient master.

For O, this world and the wrong it does!

They are safe in heaven with their backs to it, The Michaels and Rafaels you hum and buzz

Round the works of, you of the little wit; Do their eyes contract to the earth's old scope, Now that they see God face to face, And have all attained to be poets, I hope?

"T is their holiday now, in any case.

Robert Browning.

MASACCIO.

IN THE BRANCACCI CHAPEL.

E came to Florence long ago,

HE

And painted here these walls, that shone

For Raphael and for Angelo,

With secrets deeper than his own,
Then shrank into the dark again,

And died, we know not how or when.

The shadows deepened, and I turned
Half sadly from the fresco grand;
"And is this," mused I, "all ye earned,
High-vaulted brain and cunning hand,
That ye to greater men could teach
The skill yourselves could never reach ?"

"And who were they," I mused, "that wrought
Through pathless wilds, with labor long,
The highways of our daily thought?
Who reared those towers of earliest song
That lift us from the throng to peace
Remote in sunny silences?

Out clanged the Ave Mary bells,
And to my heart this message came:
Each clamorous throat among them tells
What strong-souled martyrs died in flame