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 crumbly

Could not Alesso Baldovinetti

Contribute so much, I ask him humbly?

XXVIII.

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.

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!

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-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,
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!

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,
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, 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,
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

Oh, to be in England

Now that April's there,

I.

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England-now!

II.

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops at the bent spray's edge-
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest should think he never could recapture

you

The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children's dower

Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM THE SEA.

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-West died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay ;
In the dimmest North-East distance dawned Gibraltar grand and

gray;

"Here and here did England help me how can I help England?" say,

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray, While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.