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 crumbly
Could not Alesso Baldovinetti la
Contribute so much, I ask him humbly?

Margheritone of Arezzo,

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.

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

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 ?

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.

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!

How we shall prologuize, how we shall pero ate, 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.

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.

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

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 black bird's tune,
And May, and June!

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 - 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, forever 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,

16 1 14-23

tent was unlooped;

I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I stooped ;]

Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered and gone,

That extends to the second enclosure, I groped my way on

Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more I prayed,

And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid

But spoke, "Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice replied.

At the first I saw naught but the blackness: but soon I descried

A something more black than the blackness · the vast, the upright

Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight

Then I tuned my harp, took off the lilies we twine round its chords

Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide those sunbeams like swords!

And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one,

So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done.

They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed

Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream's bed;

And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star

Into eve and the blue far above us, and so far!

VI

-so blue

"Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste,

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.

Oh, the wild joys of living the leaping from rock up to rock,

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock

Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear,

And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.

And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,

And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell

That the water was wont to go warbling so

softly and well.

How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ

All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!

Hast thou loved the white locks of thy father. whose sword thou didst guard

When he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious reward?

Didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as men sung

The low song of the nearly-departed, and hear her faint tongue

Joining in while it could to the witness, 'Let

one more attest,

I have lived, seen God's hand through a lifetime, and all was for best'?

Then they sung through their tears in strong triumphy, not much, but the rest.

1

nd thy brothers, the help and the contest, the working whence grew

Such result as, from seething grape-bundles, the spirit strained true:

And the friends of thy boyhoodof wonder and hope,

that boyhood

Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,

Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine;

And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head combine!

On one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage (like the throe

That, a-work in the rock, helps its labor and lets the gold go)

High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them, - all

Brought to blaze on the head of one creature King Saul!"

X

And lo, with that leap of my spirit, heart, hand, harp and voice,

Each lifting Saul's name out of sorrow, each bidding rejoice

Saul's fame in the light it was made for-as when, dare I say,

The Lord's army, in rapture of service, strains through its array,

And upsoareth the cherubim-chariot-"Saul!" cried I, and stopped,

And waited the thing that should follow. Then Saul, who hung propped

By the tent's cross-support in the centre, was struck by his name.

Have ye seen when Spring's arrowy summons goes right to the aim,

And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held (he alone,

While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad bust of stone

A year's snow bound about for a breastplate, leaves grasp of the sheet?

Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet,

And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your mountain of old,

With his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages untold

Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow and scar

Of his head thrust 'twixt you and the tempest -all hail, there they are!

-Now again to be softened with verdure, again

hold the nest

Of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to

the green on his crest

For their food in the ardors of summer. One long shudder thrilled

All the tent till the very air tingled, then sank and was stilled

At the King's self left standing before me, released and aware.

What was gone, what remained? All to tra-
verse 'twixt hope and despair,
Death was past, life not come: so he waited.
Awhile his right hand

Held the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant forthwith to remand

To their place what new objects should enter: 't was Saul as before.

I looked up and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was hurt any more

Than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch from the shore,

At their sad level gaze o'er the ocean-a sun's slow decline

Over hills which, resolved in stern silence, o'erlap and entwine

Base with base to knit strength more intensely: so, arm folded arm

O'er the chest whose slow heavings subsided.

XI

What spell or what charm, (For awhile there was trouble within me,) what next should I urge

To sustain him where song had restored him? Song filled to the verge

His cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it yields

Of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty: beyond, on what fields,

Glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye

And bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup they put by?

He saith, "It is good;" still he drinks not: he lets me praise life,

Gives assent, yet would die for his own part.

Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree, how its stem trembled first

Till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler; then safely outburst

The fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when these too, in turn,

Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect: yet more was to learn,

E'en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. Our dates shall we slight,

When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight

Of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? Not so! stem and branch

Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine shall stanch

Every wound of man's spirit in winter. I pour thee such wine.

Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for the spirit be thine!

By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy

More indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of a boy.

Crush that life, and behold its wine running! Each deed thou hast done

Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e'en as the sun

Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface, Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace

The results of his past summer-prime, each ray of thy will,

Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill

Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth

A like cheer to their sons, who in turn, fill the South and the North

With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Carouse in the past!

But the license of age has its limit; thou diest at last :

As the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose

at her height,

So with man - so his power and his beauty forever take flight.

No! Again a long draught of my soul-wine! Look forth o'er the years!

Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with the seer's!

Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb-bid arise

A gray mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to the skies,

Let it mark where the great First King slumbers whose fame would ye know?

Up above see the rock's naked face, where the record shall go

In great characters cut by the scribe, was Saul, so he did;

And behold while I sang but O Thou who didst grant me that day,

And before it not seldom hast granted thy help to essay,

Carry on and complete an adventure, - my shield and my sword

In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was my word,

Still be with me, who then at the summit of human endeavor

And scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed hopeless as ever

On the new stretch of heaven above me — till, mighty to save,

Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance God's throne from man's grave!

-

Let me tell out my tale to its ending - my voice to my heart

Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night I took part,

As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my sheep,

And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish

like sleep!

Such

had bent

poetr He is Saul, ye remember in glory, -ere erremba

With the sages directing the work, by the populace chid,

The broad brow from the daily communio. and still, though much spent

wh ade

Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, God did choose, im

To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite lose.

For not half, they 'll affirm, is comprised there! Which fault to amend,

In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend