So finely that the pity scarcely pained.
I thought how Filicaja led on others,
Bewailers for their Italy enchained,

And how they called her childless among mothers,
Widow of empires, ay, and scarce refrained
Cursing her beauty to her face, as brothers

Might a shamed sister's,—' Had she been less fair
She were less wretched;'-how, evoking so
From congregated wrong and heaped despair
Of men and women writhing under blow,
Harrowed and hideous in a filthy lair,
Some personating Image wherein woe
Was wrapt in beauty from offending much,
They called it Cybele, or Niobe,

Or laid it corpse-like on a bier for such, Where all the world might drop for Italy

Those cadenced tears which burn not where they touch,

'Juliet of nations, canst thou die as we?

And was the violet crown that crowned thy head So over-large, though new buds made it rough, It slipped down and across thine eyelids dead, O sweet, fair Juliet ?' Of such songs enough, Too many of such complaints! behold, instead, Void at Verona, Juliet's marble trough :*

As void as that is, are all images

Men set between themselves and actual wrong,
To catch the weight of pity, meet the stress

*

They show at Verona, as the tomb of Juliet, an empty trough

of stone.

Of conscience, since 'tis easier to gaze long
On mournful masks and sad effigies

Than on real, live, weak creatures crushed by strong.

For me who stand in Italy to-day

Where worthier poets stood and sang before,
I kiss their footsteps yet their words gainsay.
I can but muse in hope upon this shore
Of golden Arno as it shoots away

Through Florence' heart beneath her bridges four:
Bent bridges, seeming to strain off like bows,
And tremble while the arrowy undertide

Shoots on and cleaves the marble as it goes,
And strikes up palace-walls on either side,
And froths the cornice out in glittering rows,
With doors and windows quaintly multiplied,
And terrace-sweeps, and gazers upon all,
By whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out
From any lattice there, the same would fall
Into the river underneath, no doubt,

It runs so close and fast 'twixt wall and wall.
How beautiful! the mountains from without
In silence listen for the word said next.

What word will men say,-here where Giotto planted
His campanile like an unperplexed

Fine question Heaven-ward, touching the things granted

A noble people who, being greatly vexed In act, in aspiration keep undaunted?

What word will God say? Michel's Night and Day And Dawn and Twilight wait in marble scorn*

Like dogs upon a dunghill, couched on clay From whence the Medicean stamp's outworn, The final putting off of all such sway

By all such hands, and freeing of the unborn

In Florence and the great world outside Florence. Three hundred years his patient statues wait

In that small chapel of the dim Saint Lawrence: Day's eyes are breaking bold and passionate

Over his shoulder, and will flash abhorrence On darkness and with level looks meet fate,

When once loose from that marble film of theirs ; The Night has wild dreams in her sleep, the Dawn Is haggard as the sleepless, Twilight wears A sort of horror; as the veil withdrawn

'Twixt the artist's soul and works had left them heirs Of speechless thoughts which would not quail nor fawn, Of angers and contempts, of hope and love :

For not without a meaning did he place

The princely Urbino on the seat above

With everlasting shadow on his face,

While the slow dawns and twilights disapprove The ashes of his long-extinguished race

Which never more shall clog the feet of men.

* These famous statues recline in the Sagrestia Nuova, on the tombs of Giuliano de' Medici, third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Lorenzo of Urbino, his grandson. Strozzi's epigram on the Night, with Michel Angelo's rejoinder, is well known.

I do believe, divinest Angelo,

That winter-hour in Via Larga, when
They bade thee build a statue up in snow*
And straight that marvel of thine art again
Dissolved beneath the sun's Italian glow,

Thine eyes, dilated with the plastic passion,
Thawing too in drops of wounded manhood, since,
To mock alike thine art and indignation,
Laughed at the palace-window the new prince,—
('Aha! this genius needs for exaltation,
When all's said and howe'er the proud may wince,
A little marble from our princely mines!')
I do believe that hour thou laughedst too

For the whole sad world and for thy Florentines, After those few tears, which were only few!

That as, beneath the sun, the grand white lines
Of thy snow-statue trembled and withdrew,-
The head, erect as Jove's, being palsied first,
The eyelids flattened, the full brow turned blank,
The right-hand, raised but now as if it cursed,
Dropt, a mere snowball, (till the people sank

Their voices, though a louder laughter burst
From the royal window)—thou couldst proudly thank
God and the prince for promise and presage,
And laugh the laugh back, I think verily,

Thine eyes being purged by tears of righteous rage To read a wrong into a prophecy,

*This mocking task was set by Pietro, the unworthy successor of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

VOL. III.

R

And measure a true great man's heritage Against a mere great-duke's posterity.

I think thy soul said then, 'I do not need A princedom and its quarries, after all;

For if I write, paint, carve a word, indeed, On book or board or dust, on floor or wall, The same is kept of God who taketh heed That not a letter of the meaning fall

Or ere it touch and teach His world's deep heart, Outlasting, therefore, all your lordships, sir!

So keep your stone, beseech you, for your part, To cover up your grave-place and refer

The proper titles; I live by my art.

The thought I threw into this snow shall stir
This gazing people when their gaze is done;
And the tradition of your act and mine,
When all the snow is melted in the sun,
Shall gather up, for unborn men, a sign

Of what is the true princedom,-ay, and none Shall laugh that day, except the drunk with wine.'

Amen, great Angelo! the day 's at hand. If many laugh not on it, shall we weep?

Much more we must not, let us understand. Through rhymers sonneteering in their sleep

And archaists mumbling dry bones up the land And sketchers lauding ruined towns a-heap,-Through all that drowsy hum of voices smooth, The hopeful bird mounts carolling from brake,